The Madison Municipal Building is officially slated to receive a complete remodel in 2017.
The $22.5 million project will involve total replacement of the building’s heating and cooling systems, electrical system and plumbing as well as a substantial redesign of the building’s interior and a touch-up of the building’s exterior, City Architect Bryan Cooper said.
The building’s 200 staffers — along with some priceless antique furniture and artwork — will likely be relocated to makeshift facilities while the historic building is renovated over a 16-month period starting in 2017, Cooper said.
Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4 said renovations to the outdated, and aged building are long overdue.
“The Madison Municipal Building deserves to be taken care of, and frankly, the city has done a poor job of taking care of it for far too long,” Verveer said. “It’s an ancient building and we’ve been wasting money repairing it instead of giving it the renovation it really needs.”
One of the city’s primary goals in remodeling the building, is to eliminate some of the its longstanding inefficiencies by optimizing the building’s layout, Cooper said.
When the city first purchased the municipal building from the federal government in the 1980s, city agencies moved into the building in a somewhat disorganized fashion, giving it a confusing layout, Cooper said.
“A lot of the building has just been just folks moving in wherever there’s open space, so it’s kind of left the building in sort of a hodgepodge arrangement of different programs,” Cooper said.
As a result of the building’s layout, citizens visiting the building to utilize government services oftentimes find themselves lost and perplexed, Verveer said.
Many of the service-oriented parts of the building — the building-permit counter and the zoning counter, for example — are counterintuitively located in the basement. Verveer said the first floor of the building would be remodeled to serve as an all-encompassing “service counter operation” serving the public.
“There are certain parts of the building that are not as cohesive and efficient as they could be,” Verveer said. “So, one of the goals of the renovation is to lay out offices, meeting rooms and other areas in a more functional way — especially those areas which receive a fair amount of traffic from the public.”
Another goal the city has in mind in its renovation of the municipal building, is to restore and accentuate the building’s historical features, Verveer said.
Many of the building’s pre-WWII features were covered up when the city first renovated the building in the 1980s, Verveer said.
“The goal of the renovation is to celebrate the historic architecture of the building,” Verveer said. “It has been recognized and is protected to various degrees by the federal, state and local governments as a historic building both for its history and its architecture. Therefore, we must have a renovation that is historically sensitive and preserves the historical features of the building.”
The renovations will also address an ongoing shortage of meeting rooms by improving both the quantity and quality of meeting rooms in the building, Cooper said.
In addition, the city intends to address energy efficiency in the new building pursuant to city policy; there has been discussion of installing solar panels on the roof of the new building, Verveer said.
Cooper said most of the design work will likely be finished by April 2016, and construction documents will be drafted summer 2016. He said construction will likely start in early 2017 and finish in 2018.
