A workshop intended to kick-start discussion on a future Kennewick City Hall led to a tense debate among council members on whether keeping the city’s offices downtown is the best way to support east Kennewick.

City Manager Erin Erdman was seeking consensus from the council on a starting budget for the project, currently estimated at $35.5 million, as well as how quickly to move forward and whether to build downtown or elsewhere in the city.

However, the conversation quickly became tangled as council members went back and forth on everything from how best to address current and future technology needs, whether the project will require the city to raise taxes, and a lack of objective data showing it is best to keep the facility downtown or if it even benefited those older neighborhoods.

“We’re not the greatest and best use for economic development for this area,” said Councilman Brad Beauchamp. “It’s not abandoning east Kennewick. It’s what can we replace (City Hall) with that is of benefit to east Kennewick.”

Kennewick City Hall is just one of the municipal facilities making up the civic center on Sixth Avenue between Dayton and Auburn streets. The city police station, fire department headquarters, municipal pool, activity center and gym and community center are all on that block or within a few minutes’ walk. However, that co-location of facilities was not necessarily planned or intended.

“One of the reasons we have this property is that the (Kennewick School District) had it on the market for a long time and couldn’t sell it,” Erdman told the council.

City Hall was built about 60 years ago and is a top priority for replacement by the city. City staffing has reached a point where it is running out of room in the building, along with needed storage space for files and equipment.

More urgently, the building has millions of dollars’ worth of needed repairs, from a leaky roof to failing and outdated heating, ventilation and air conditioning and information technology. The city’s data center, in particular, is facing multiple component replacements and a need for updated infrastructure in the next few years.

A new City Hall would need just under 2 acres, Erdman said, which is available to the east of the existing building. The city also has enough property for the project on land it owns near the Benton County Fairgrounds, near the Three Rivers Convention Center and at the Southridge Sports Complex.

The project would be funded via bonds that would be repaid from current city tax collections and potentially some cost sharing with utility providers, Finance Director Jessica Platt told the council. No new taxes are anticipated to be needed to pay for the project.

Erdman told the council that the pressing maintenance and technology issues meant the city needed to decide whether to move quickly on replacing the building to make sure those could be addressed or taking more time and finding at least temporary solutions with the current building.

Council members touched on multiple facets of the project in their ensuing discussions. Councilman Loren Anderson posed several questions on whether the city should maintain its own data center or transition to a cloud-based service, along with other technological advancements.

“Is this being built with those things in mind or are we building on an infrastructure that was designed a hundred years ago and isn’t necessarily efficient going forward?” he asked.

Beauchamp asked if the project would truly be funded without new taxes, saying, “You’re going to spend the money here and you may raise the taxes somewhere else, that’s just the truth of it.”

But the site of a future City Hall generated the most debate.

Mayor Gretl Crawford, Mayor Pro-Tem Chuck Torelli and council members Jim Milbauer and John Trumbo signaled they want to keep City Hall close to downtown.

Torelli said that moving to an area where there is more growth, such as Southridge, would mean the city would take potentially valuable land off tax rolls because the city wouldn’t pay property taxes on it. Other city services and departments would remain downtown, potentially creating barriers to collaboration.

“Unless there’s a very strong reason, I don’t see any added value in moving away from the civic complex,” Torelli said.

Trumbo said moving City Hall “will suck the air out of downtown,” with Crawford adding that city employees do support downtown businesses.

“When we do citizen polls, it is all about taking care of downtown Kennewick,” Crawford said.

Anderson, Beauchamp and Councilman Jason McShane indicated they either actively wanted to move City Hall to a more visible or centrally-located place or at least have new data and research done to determine whether it should remain downtown or elsewhere.

Beauchamp said that while he doesn’t know what would be best to fill the space that could be vacated if City Hall left the downtown area, he noted that being located downtown hasn’t prevented the area from struggling. Anderson, meanwhile, said any decision on where to locate City Hall should be based on current data on the community’s usage of the building and services.

“Let’s have an outside source crunch the numbers, travel time, efficiencies,” Anderson said. “We’re not experts.”

McShane wasn’t comfortable moving forward on any option until there was a master plan developed with long-term objectives and goals. If anything, the council needs to dedicate the same level of planning and scrutiny for a new City Hall as it did for the expansion of Three Rivers Convention Center, of which the city is providing $71.3 million in financing, he said.

With a 4-3 consensus among the council, Erdman said city staff will begin moving forward with planning for a new City Hall tentatively to be built in downtown Kennewick, as well as gathering more data to inform the project, including other possible sites, timeline and process.

“There will be exit ramps,” Erdman said. “We can do parallel processes. We’d still have to provide a consultant with locations and why.”