City opens $2.65M spaces to the media for a tour
New and larger banquet area was ‘desperately’ needed, city official says
Faced with the temporary fouryear closure of a banquet room and meeting spaces in old City Hall, officials spent $2.65 million building a larger banquet space and accompanying bathrooms, serving room, reception areas and council boardroom that all together total 7,754-square feet.
Darrel Bell, the city’s manager of facility infrastructure, said the recent three-month renovations of a former civic cafeteria in the municipal building was the most economical solution to fix the temporary loss of space while Calgary’s historic City Hall is closed.
“We did look at other options, other buildings and leases, and this was the most cost-effective solution to deliver the functions that I was removing by closing down historic City Hall,” Bell said.
Old City Hall was closed and its occupants were relocated in August so crews could start restoring its crumbling exterior as part of a four-year, $34.1-million rehabilitation project council approved in 2015.
On Wednesday, media toured the 7,754-square foot renovated space that features a 1,384-square foot council boardroom, which will be primarily used for closed-door council meetings, a 2,426-square foot Calgary Power Reception Hall for entertaining dignitaries and hosting city training sessions, and a server room for use by catering companies.
The large area, located behind locked doors across from public washrooms behind council chambers, has been finished by city interior designers with art from the city’s collection, faux-wood vinyl, and Italian bathroom tile.
“They may be made in Italy but we didn’t buy them from Italy, they’re sourced and procured in Canada,” Bell said.
Come late 2020, when the sandstone restoration work on old City Hall is scheduled to be complete, the city will have both the original 1,375-square-foot Calgary Power Reception Hall in old City Hall as well as the new 2,426-square-foot space that shares the same name and features multiple automated screens and monitors.
The new banquet space is one “the corporation desperately needs,” and will make use of for four years while the old one is closed, said Bell.
“After that is done, the city doesn’t have a space like that anywhere in its portfolio. So it’s going to be a long-term asset to the corporation and it will pay back itself over time, no doubt in my mind,” Bell said.
The so-called Council Boardroom, which will be used when Calgary’s elected officials go behind closed doors during public meetings, is not temporary, according to Bell, and will continue to be used when old City Hall reopens.
“It’s a permanent solution for council in-camera meetings,” he said. “The one that they used before was, to be perfectly honest, inside of another space and it was less than suitable for the work they had to do.”
The boardroom features a Ushaped table that seats 32, a ceiling microphone system so the table isn’t cluttered with microphones, and large flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls.
A two-page city fact sheet that was distributed to Calgary’s elected officials on Monday, when they met for the first time in the new space, states crews, “took a number of steps to ensure that the space met the end users needs while being fiscally responsible.”