Council on Board with Contemporary Hall Design

CAPE MAY — City Council is supporting architect Martin Kimmel’s design number five as the basis for a preliminary design for a new Convention Hall here.
The design is mostly contemporary with some hints of a former Convention Hall that was built in 1917.
At an Aug. 26 town meeting, Mayor Edward J. Mahaney Jr. said council considered nine designs from Kimmel and decided the 1917 facade would be too vulnerable to storm damage.
Mahaney said council has arrived at consensus for the style of the building and Kimmel would now move on with a preliminary design to present to voters before the Nov. 4 election.
The mayor said council also considered other designs and recommendations from architect Andy O’Sullivan, C.J. Johnson Consultants and Rhodeside and Harwell.
The mayor answered criticism from a few audience members who asked for a hall with the facade of the 1917 facility.
Resident James Wyatt same he expected to see a new design at the meeting from Kimmel that looked more like the 1917 building.
“Now he’s not here and we’re only eight weeks away from the referendum and there’s a lot of people in this town that are very upset that he’s not going to present it…” he said.
Mahaney said council took Wyatt’s suggestions seriously. He said not everybody who has attended the town meetings wanted the 1917 facade.
The mayor said a design with that facade could not be found that would be supported by any engineer. He said based on surveying residents in the city, he believed there were an “inordinate number of people in the audience” that wanted the old building design as opposed to public opinion.
Gurney Street resident Terry Shields said while he liked the 1917 facade, “we have to progress.”
Mahaney said altering the design of a new Convention Hall to retain the Solarium in its current location would not be feasible because a new facility could not abut a wood frame building due to fire codes.
He said council supported the Solarium being moved to another location on the beach front rather than be demolished which would provide additional restrooms for the beach.
He said the Solarium is 15 years old, in good condition and owned outright by the city.
Mahaney said council agreed a new Convention Hall should have about 1,200 seats with no balcony seating and retail stores and a restaurant that tenants would need to improve and finish.
The second floor of the proposed hall would house administrative offices, community meeting rooms and well as space for heat and air conditioning systems, said Mahaney.
“The ability to downsize the project by simply extracting some number of feet out of the building creates a domino effect on other features in the building or mostly notably reduces the size of the auditorium area,” he said.
City Auditor Leon Costello said debt service is excluded from state caps on city budgets. He said debt service such as a new Convention Hall was a stand-alone item that would not affect the city’s ability to spend money on such items as police salaries or cleaning the streets.
Costello said the Convention Hall would be financed with bond anticipation notes due in 2010. He said the hall would most likely not impact any city budget until 2010.
In the year 2013, the bond anticipation notes would be replaced by a bond sale.
Costello said the city would continue to undertake other capital projects. He said his job was to make sure no one yearly budget was impacted severely by capital projects.
Based on bonding $16 million, including the hall and another $6 million for other city projects, the most the tax rate in Cape May would increase would be 2 cents in the year 2014 for debt service. Costello said that figure did not take into account an approximate $1.4 million grant coming from the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority.