New city offices open for business

City employees will have a little more breathing room thanks to a renovation completed this week on the Howard Municipal Building.

Renovation began in December 2005, and Columbia’s Municipal Court, city prosecutor’s office, Human Resources Department and parking utility moved in to a modernized and more space-efficient building.

Municipal Court Clerk Shara Meyer said that before the improvements, employees had to share work space in the court’s second-floor office, which lacked enough storage room to hold all the court’s files.

“We had three people in one office, two people sharing a (customer service) window, and one employee working in a hallway,” Meyer said. “Now all of our court files are in a file storage area here in the basement, which is really convenient.”

Meyer said she and her co-workers had a say in the design and layout of the rooms and after seven months of working in temporary facilities across the street in the Daniel Boone Building, they’re happy to be back.

“It’s just a better use of space. The office is laid out better and more conducive to getting work done,” Meyer said. “It is very pleasant.”

New offices, carpet and light fixtures are just a few of the improvements made to the 74-year-old building, which formerly served as City Hall. Emergency exits and a fire escape were also installed.

“The major changes are all-new administrators’ offices. With the exception of the courtroom itself, the entire building was gutted, taken down and redesigned based upon the needs of each department,” Assistant City Manager Tony St. Romaine said.

A space study completed by the consulting group Paulien and Associates helped project the city’s growth and building needs for the future.

“We designed the space so that the city can get at least another 15 years of use,” St. Romaine said.

Besides cleaning and restoring the municipal courtroom’s dozen murals, workers removed the courtroom’s jury box, stripped and refinished all the doors and repaired the flooring around the judge’s bench.

The Municipal Court wasn’t the only office in the 22,000-square-foot Howard Building to receive a significant increase in space.

“The human resources’ space,” which was formerly in the Gentry Building, “had become totally unmanageable,” St. Romaine said. “Now they have a separate file area.”

The building’s first floor will house the Human Resources Department, along with several conference rooms that will be used for city meetings, interviews and applicant testing.

“The first floor was vacated a year and a half ago when the health department left to go to the Sanford–Kimpton Building, which was the former Nowell’s facility off Worley Street,” St. Romaine said. “Human resources will take the entire first floor along with a division of employee health.”

The Howard Building’s lower level will house the city parking utility, which St. Romaine said was formerly in a “very cramped facility” at the Wabash bus station.

While the outside of the Howard Building did not change in the renovation, St. Romaine said the city plans to install large planters and benches outside the entrance.

Renovation of the 8,000-square-foot Gentry Building is scheduled to begin next week.

The Howard Building project cost $1.8 million. Improvements to the Gentry Building will cost an estimated $767,600.