Mayor Robert Smith can see the light at the end of the tunnel for the Columbus City Hall renovation.
Smith and other city officials, whose offices were located in city hall, have been working out of temporary locations since fall 2015, before the first stages of the 113-year-old building’s renovation began.
Now, city hall’s work is nearly complete, with an expected finish date of Jan. 25.
Shortly after that, the city will move equipment back to city hall so officials like the mayor, Chief Financial Officer Milton Rawle, Chief Operations Officer David Armstrong and others can return.
After a year-and-a-half of working away from city hall, in a city-owned strip mall next to the municipal center on Main Street, Smith said he and other city officials are looking forward to moving back into their old home.
“We all are just elated to see it come to fruition,” Smith said. “We’ve been here (in the temporary offices) so long that me, I’ve just become accustomed to just coming here. I don’t know how to act if I can go back up there now.”
Smith also said the spaces that currently serve as the mayor’s office and chief financial officer’s office will be available for rent once the move back to city hall is complete.
The project originally had an expected Jan. 9 completion date, but the city allowed an extension to Jan. 25 after asbestos was discovered in one of the main hallways. Jeff Johnson, a project manager for contractor J5 Broaddus, said the work to remove the asbestos, which has been completed, added $3,125 to the $1.93 million overall project cost.
“It was kind of a godsend when we found it, because it was that break around the Christmas timeframe, and that really helped us out,” Johnson said.
Work on city hall is about 97 percent complete, Johnson said. Much of the work left to do includes touch-ups, such as sanding and staining the downstairs floors, touching up paint work and putting pieces such as toilets and sinks into the bathrooms.
The city will continue to work with Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which is funding the renovation, as it goes through the project’s final steps. Interim City Planner George Irby, who has worked with MDAH throughout the project, said everything appears to be in order for final approval.
“They give the final approval,” Irby said. “After all the work is done, they have to go in and do the final inspection. The project was in two phases — exterior and interior. On the exterior, they’ve signed off, and all that’s complete so we’ve closed that one out. Now it’s the interiors, and as far as they’re concerned with what they’ve seen, everything is going as designed.”
Smith, who expressed gratitude to J5 and Irby for their work through the project, said it is the first complete renovation since city hall’s original construction in 1903.
“They’ve done some patchwork and minor renovation, but this is the first total one,” he said. “It was gutted out.
“This is a great asset to the city overall, and the thing about it is, we didn’t have to do a bond to support the project,” he added. “It was a good partnership between the city of Columbus and the state of Mississippi. I’m very thankful to Mississippi Archives and History and Representative Jeff Smith for taking the lead on this and other representatives in the Golden Triangle for supporting the project.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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