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COLUMBUS, Ga. — As of this coming Tuesday, July 18, 2023, the city’s top governmental offices are scheduled to open for business at the new downtown City Hall complex.
The new City Hall complex is located in the former Synovus building at 1146 and 1148 Broadway.
Nearly two years ago on September 28, 2021, the Columbus Consolidated Government approved a resolution to fund the purchase and renovation of the downtown building complex.
The resolution authorized the issuance of $50 million worth of government lease revenue bonds from the Columbus Building authority. Half of that total was for the initial purchase of the buildings — which included its 634-space parking deck — and the other half was to cover the renovations required to outfit the complex for government use.
According to CCG’s Director of Inspections and Codes, Ryan Pruett, several of the city’s departments are already operating out of the new building, with all of the following slated to begin serving the public on July 18:
- Mayor’s Office (Third Floor)
- City Manager’s Office (Third Floor)
- City Attorney’s Office (Third Floor)
- Clerk of Council’s Office (Third Floor)
- Job Training Division (Second Floor)
- IT Department (Second Floor)
- Parks & Recreation Department (Second Floor)
- Human Resources (HR Building, First & Second Floor)
- 311 Citizen Services Center (First Floor)
- Finance Department (First Floor)
- UGA Cooperative Extension (First Floor)
It should be noted that while City Council itself holds its meetings at the City Services Center on the other side of town, the Clerk of Council’s Office will now be housed apart from where Council itself operates. Since Councilors do not have their own offices, they have previously relied on resources afforded to the Clerk of Council that are no longer directly accessible to them.
The entire move to purchase, renovate, and relocate into the new City Hall complex — which is part of a string of infrastructure revamp at the total cost of $743 million — comes after decades of willful neglect of the city’s existing downtown Government Center building.
A technical document produced by the Columbus Consolidated Government shows it knew the downtown government center wasn’t being maintained since at least 2007.
Despite the 2007 document showing a known lack of maintenance for at least the past 16 years, three different mayoral administrations have continued to blame the building’s ‘old age’ for its decrepit condition. One administration passed the problem onto the next as they made excuses and pretended the problem was somehow ‘normal.’
Meanwhile, for that entire 16 year period, City Manager Isaiah Hugley sat by the entire time and did absolutely nothing to ensure the proper maintenance of the structure; it continued to decay into its current state of governmentally-created blight.
Now, as a direct result of the well-documented willful negligence, taxpayers are left to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to fund the replacement of buildings their local government knowingly failed to maintain for no less than 16 years — which is a third of the 50-year-old building’s entire existence.
Perhaps city officials should step outside, get some fresh air, and then re-smell their own cooking when they step back into their aMaZiNg kitchen. It stinks. Expensively.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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