Whitefish City Hall saga successfully completed

The city of Whitefish opens for business tomorrow in some pretty nice new digs.

The $16 million new brick City Hall and adjoining parking garage — built downtown on the site of the city’s 1917 City Hall — is an impressive accomplishment for the resort town. It’s been a long and sometimes bumpy road for a project that started well over a decade ago.

A 2006 Whitefish downtown master plan identified the need for a new City Hall and pointed to a spot north of the library (the city’s snow lot) as the preferred site. At that point the city had just $1.5 million set aside for a new facility.

Then-City Manager Gary Marks immediately took the lead in exploring options and came up with the idea of a “green” City Hall with amenities such as a dirt roof — a roof-top garden perhaps — and a water-collection system that could store runoff for irrigation. The City Council at the time went gaga over the idea of an eco-friendly institution but eventually set aside that plan because of the cost.

In 2011 a committee tasked with finding potential sites for a new City Hall put together five options and the council, to its credit, went through an exhaustive public process that ultimately revealed the community wanted the new City Hall exactly where the old one was. Some Whitefish residents are still grousing about that decision, arguing the city could have repurposed a building such as the former Mountain West Bank and spent a lot less money. Yet others said a new site farther away from downtown would have allowed room for more downtown retail development.

That’s water under the bridge now.

Even after the location was picked, the council wrestled with the design, with split votes over details such as whether or not to have a curved inside wall in the lobby area. Whitefish used a combination of tax-increment finance district revenue saved through the years plus a multimillion-dollar tax-increment bond to pay for the project, but the cost kept going up and up.

By July 2015 the council was looking for ways to trim the project to keep it within budget. Even so, a price tag of $13 million for the combined City Hall and parking structure eventually grew to $14.95 million, and ultimately to $16 million after contaminated soil was discovered at the building site. The removal of the polluted dirt added another pile of money to the project.

Amid all the numbers-crunching, Whitefish philanthropist Richard Atkinson came up with a plan to put the City Hall project to a public vote. His idea, which never got off the ground, was to have an initiative process to amend city law to require a public vote on City Hall projects costing more than $3 million.

With all the twists and turns this project has taken, we imagine Whitefish folks — at least the city staff — will be celebrating as the doors open tomorrow at 418 E. Second St. at the very spot Whitefish city government operated a century ago. The parking structure will be well-used; that’s a real plus for the downtown area.

So congratulations, Whitefish, you did it. You finally have a new City Hall.