By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
The city of Waldport made decisions Thursday to resolve its building “musical chairs.”
The City Council agreed to move City Hall from its current location to the former Umpqua Bank building across Oregon Highway 34, triggering a handful of other decisions on property it owns downtown. It also:
- Gave City Manager Dann Cutter the go-ahead to apply for a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for remodeling the former bank building it got for free a year ago. It’s the same pool of federal money the city of Yachats tapped into this year to help pay for the move of its city offices into a bank building it bought in 2015.
- Approved making the Waldport Heritage Museum a city department similar to the Library, and make museum director Colleen Nickerson a 15-hour-a-week city employee.
- Approved moving displays out of the museum building on Northeast Grant Street and put them in the Alsea Bay Interpretive Center, which the city acquired last month from Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department. The city doesn’t expect to open the center until late next spring.
- Directed Cutter to seek proposals from any civic or nonprofit group on how they would use the former museum building to the benefit of the community.
The City Hall move was already in progress, partly because of issues related to coronavirus restrictions. Finance staff are already spending several hours a day at the former bank, manning its drive-through window to collect city payments and deal with other customers who can’t enter City Hall.
Cutter is already using some federal coronavirus relief funds to remodel the 3,000-square-foot bank building, splitting the interior space into offices and making room for council chambers.
“I think everybody’s eager to move over there,” he told YachatsNews. “I expect we will be in there by the end of March, if not sooner.”
Moving the museum’s historical displays to the interpretive center has been hailed as a win-win by everyone involved. The current museum three blocks north of Highway 34 draws little traffic. The center, at the south end of the Alsea Bay Bridge, is a major tourist draw when it is open but has struggled to find volunteers.
As for the museum building, Cutter said the initial idea to use the 1,600-square-foot space was focused on arts and cultural groups, specifically the four-year-old Waldport Arts Group which has been fundraising to find a home. But the council on Thursday widened the scope of groups to encourage any others to apply if their programs would benefit the public.
“I don’t expect a lot of groups to apply, but there will be a few groups,” Cutter said, including the Waldport Lions Club, which is also seeking a home.
Fire district eyes City Hall
What’s slightly less clear is what will happen with the current City Hall.
The city owns those offices and the much larger attached building used by the Central Coast Fire & Rescue District. The district currently rents the space for just $1 a year, Cutter said. But that deal ends in July 2022, Cutter said, at which time the city would have to charge the fire district current market rental rates – which would be substantially higher.
The fire district recently completed research on what it would cost to build a new station out of the tsunami zone, Cutter said, and apparently decided that would be prohibitively expensive. The Yachats Rural Fire Protection District finished a new station last year out of the tsunami zone that cost $8 million and required a voter-approved bond.
Cutter said it will be up to the fire district’s board to determine if it wants to buy or lease. And there is no big hurry, he said.
“We just need to recover the cost of the building so we’re not subsidizing the fire district,” Cutter said. “There is no timeline. It will take as long as it takes.”