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The Aurora City Council is examining a change order to cover an increase in the cost of a renovation project at City Hall.
The change order of $272,586 would cover additional costs encountered in the renovation and upgrade of the council chambers on the second floor, as well as renovation of the conference rooms and media center on the fifth floor.
The increase would push the original $1.77 million contract for the renovation to more than $2 million.
Tony Martinez, the city’s director of communication, said many of the additional costs were unanticipated because of the age of the building. As things were torn out of the older building, other things were discovered that made the job costlier, he said.
The city recently finished renovation of the fifth floor conference room where both committee meetings and full council meetings have been held while the second floor council chambers are being finished. The plan is to go back to having committee meetings on the fifth floor, and full council meetings on the second floor, when everything is finished.
The project already has created a communication center out of conference rooms that includes a new public access studio and a press room.
City officials have said the work will improve the ability to communicate both during live meetings at City Hall, and on how things are broadcast on both the city’s public access television channel and on social media, such as Facebook and the city’s website.
The contract would be about 65% paid from American Rescue Plan Act funds, and about 35% paid from the fees the city gets annually from Comcast. That company pays the city about $1.7 million a year, coming to about $17 million over the 10-year agreement it has with the city.
The project currently underway will renovate the City Council chambers on the second floor of City Hall by creating a new, more inviting and usable entryway, opening up the ceilings and eliminating the bolted down chairs and replacing them with individual, stackable chairs that can be moved around. They also could be linked together.
The council dais would be expanded to include the corporation counsel and city clerk, eliminating a small table in front where they currently sit. The dais would include kevlar, as an added security measure.
The room also will be more tech and communication savvy, with cameras that swivel in all directions, new microphones that would have a remote and central control area, new speakers and repositioned display areas.
Martinez said the change order includes cost of furniture, which has been “much greater than anticipated;” higher costs for an Americans with Disabilities Act chairlift; and new speaker locations which had to be moved once the ceilings were opened.
The project also includes some holdovers from the fifth floor work, including a recording system that can be programmed to automatically start to record all committee meetings. That will reduce the amount of time the communications team has to be at City Hall, Martinez said.
“When the system was implemented, we found ourselves being here every night,” he said.
The change order also includes developing a mobile production unit that would allow the city to broadcast from anywhere in the city. It would allow a team from the communications department to cover things such as back to school events, parades and other events in the different wards without hiring a company to do it, Martinez said.
The unit would send it back to the city’s communications center, which would then send it out to various social media platforms.
Officials plan for all the work on both floors to be done by the end of the year.
Aldermen at this week’s Committee of the Whole meeting put the change order on the consent agenda, meaning it is likely to be approved.