The Corona City Council last month decided against moving forward with a plan to relocate a portion of the historic Corona Depot building, opting instead to only preserve “key components” for future use.
According to Aminah Mears, assistant to the city manager, those components would include roof tiles, windows, sliding doors and any other historic design elements that can be reused with a total estimated cost between $25,000 and $50,000. That entire cost could be covered using a $50,000 contribution Ganahl Lumber, which owns the structure, said it would donate for the preservation.
The discussion of what to do with the structure started last May and resulted in the council voting last summer to move forward with a plan to relocate a portion of the historic Corona Depot building at an estimated cost of $250,000 with the help of the Ganahl contribution.
Since then, Mears said city staff had been working to fully understand the cost of the project and presented the council with six options ranging in price from $0, if the council were to do nothing, to more than $7.5 million, if the council were to move and rehabilitate the waiting, patio and baggage areas for other uses such as a coffee shop, concession stand or restrooms at the city park.
“Relocation helps preserve history, we do know that, but that adaptive reuse can be a general economic activity for the city,” Aminah Mears, assistant to the city manager, said at the Feb. 19 meeting. “On the other hand, economic viability is questionable or probably not realized in a new city park location, and lastly, most of the options are expensive and high in cost, especially when considering whenever we move the structures, it might lose this historical integrity and value.”
And though Mears said the city was in the process of completing its building relocation permit, she also noted that Ganahl Lumber had submitted its application for demolition, something that resident Don Fuller said he was in support of doing.
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“My feeling is still to run a bulldozer through the thing, and put it through a wood chipper,” he said. “I would doubt very much if you’re going to find 10 or 12 people in this town who are not in this room who actually give a rat’s fanny about this place.”
Fuller said that it seemed to him like there was a better way to spend the money that would otherwise be tied up in relocating and rehabilitating the structure, a sentiment Councilman Tony Daddario echoed.
“At the end of the day, we don’t own the building, and I’m not willing to divert money into some of these projects that the community has spoken so sincerely about to make this into a coffee shop, concession stand or restroom,” he said. “Let’s preserve the components that are necessary and move on.”
And though Councilmember Wes Speake said it was “horrible” that discussions surrounding the depot had gotten to the point where it became clear that it would be demolished, he felt that the provided options to relocate or rebuild it were a “complete waste of money.”
“Frankly, I don’t even want the $50,000 [from Granahl],” he said. “They can keep it. It’s blood money to me.”
The remainder of the council supported the option to preserve what they could, salvaging and storing the most important parts of the structure until the council could find a good use for them.
“I don’t think we have a solid vision on what we could do with it right now, so I saw we let someone else pay to store the key components, and sometime down the road, when there is a clear vision, maybe a really cool spot will open up,” Mayor Jim Steiner said. “Maybe somebody will have a really great idea on how to incorporate that into something in the future.”
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