Councillor looks to board school HQ in City Hall tower
By Andrew Dreschel
http://www.thespec.com/news/local/ar...ity-hall-tower
Downtown councillor Jason Farr is making a last-ditch attempt to keep the public school headquarters in the core.
Farr wants council to ask the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board to build its new home in a second tower on the City Hall site.
“It’ll be a sweet deal and maybe they’ll take a good hard second look at it at the very least,” said Farr.
School board spokesperson Jackie Penman declines to comment on the proposal.
She said the board has officially chosen the Crestwood school site near Upper Wentworth and Mohawk as its future administrative home and the business case has already received conditional approval from the province.
But Farr remains optimistic.
The Ward 2 councillor notes that when City Hall was constructed in 1960, architect Stanley Roscoe designed it with the idea of one day building a second tower on the south side behind the existing building.
He maintains that would not only make a great home for the board, but council would be able to offer a long-term lease at a “very palatable” rate.
Getting the board to look at it could be an uphill slog considering that last week it unveiled its $31.6 million plans for the Crestwood site.
The 113,000-square-foot building is contingent on the board selling the land it currently sits on at Main and Bay to McMaster University for the development of an $85-million downtown health campus.
Those negotiations, while expected to be concluded soon, hinge on a couple of key conditions, including finding a temporary home for the board while its new home is built.
If an agreement can be reached, the board is looking at possibly subleasing space from the city for two years in the Robert Thomson downtown.
Farr’s initiative isn’t the first fling at keeping the board in the core permanently. City staff has also tried and failed to convince them to stay put.
The board looked at 18 possible locations before settling on the Crestwood site. Cost was the decisive factor.
“I wish we could have found a way to stay in the downtown that was affordable … but all the scenarios we looked at were not affordable to us,” then-board chair Judith Bishop said last spring.
Farr hopes the City Hall proposal will change that.
“We’re going to sweeten the pot here and we want staff to negotiate something that, at the very least, is hard to say no to and, at best, they jump at.”