Rebuild City Hall? Voice Your Opinion in Public Hearings

If you ask most San Diegans where in downtown is City Hall, few could give a correct answer. And if anyone would bother to hazard a guess, I bet the most popular answer would be (incorrectly) the County Administration building on Harbor Drive.

Fact of the matter is city hall is in the Civic Center Complex on C Street and A Street (formerly known as the Community Concourse to us old-timers). Oh, sure, you can recognize the Civic Theatre, where you might have seen a concert or theatrical production, but you probably didn't realize city hall and offices also are within the complex. You don't notice, because the office space is perfunctory and just plain butt ugly. Certainly nothing befitting our fine city (notice I do not say "America's Finest City").

In any case, the Civic Center Complex has fallen in major disrepair, and doesn't even house a third of the city's 3,000 employees, who are mostly housed in leased office space around the city that costs $13.5 million annually in leases. So, now the city - this same city that can't even get its act together to build a new central public library - is holding a series of public hearings this month to figure out what to do.

The city has determined that it will take some $125 million in repairs, including seismic retrofitting. As a result, Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC), on behalf of the City of San Diego, is exploring the possible redevelopment of downtown's Civic Center.

If the project is deemed financially feasible and provides a cost savings to taxpayers, the result could be a public/private partnership, such as Horton Plaza and Petco Park, creating new and more efficient city administration facilities and the opportunity for high-density, urban mixed-use development.

Given our city's current woeful state of financial affairs, do you think this is a good time to even consider redevelopment, as opposed to just repairing the existing buildings? If you want to voice your opinion, you might want to attend one of the public hearings beginning Thursday, Aug. 14 at the Serra Mesa-Kearny Mesa Library, 9005 Aero Drive, San Diego, 92123. Other public hearings will take place over the next two weeks.