Civic center entering final phase
Phil Bisila, right, and Echel Rusnak, both of Team Construction, put finishing touches on a sidewalk in front of the Moses Lake Civic Center. The new building being constructed next to City Hall is set to be completed in September.
MOSES LAKE - The 41,300-square-foot Moses Lake Civic Center now being built next to city hall should finish in September.
City staff is ready to settle into their new offices by the end of October.
Work crews were busy smoothing out sidewalks last week as well as finishing installation of electrical, heating-air conditioning systems, plumbing and fire suppression systems, according to Moses Lake City Engineer Shawn O'Brien. He said interior framing will soon be completed throughout the building before sheetrock hanging begins, followed by the fitting of doors and windows.
"There's so much square-footage that we have to do each part of the building in different stages," he said.
The project, which kicked off last June, will provide more room for city administrative and finance department staff, along with parks and recreation employees.
Many city employees now have offices in the basement of city hall, which was built in the 1950s and renovated for more space in the 1980s and the mid-1990s, O'Brien said.
Contractors are a couple months behind schedule due to minor delays and an excess of groundwater discovered early during the project. Last fall, project superintendent Rod Lee said over a period of 16 hours three pumps flushed 1,600 gallons from a basement elevator shaft.
"We hit the water where we expected but the contractor wasn't prepared for such a large volume of groundwater," O'Brien explained.
Workers made up time by working throughout the winter months despite a record-breaking cold streak in late October.
To date, O'Brien said there have been about $90,000 in change orders on the project, adding minor improvements or clarifications to the original $7.63 million cost.
Some of the added cost is associated with the beginnings of another project: a new parking lot and landscaped area across the street from the civic center. The layout of the lot has been determined and design work is now in process with the project set to go to bid in mid-July, O'Brien said.
"Our goal is to get that wrapped up at the same time as the building," he said.
The new building is expected to receive a silver certification from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, an internationally-recognized green building certification system. In order to attain the designation, work crews are required to track all waste generated at the project site and separate re-usable items for recycling, such as scrap wood and metal. Some of the building's panels and flooring consist of sustainable products, including cork and bamboo, and O'Brien said, most counter tops will be made with recycled materials.
Getting LEED certification was one of the requirements of a $1 million Washington State Historical Society grant the city was awarded in 2006 to help fund a new city museum building. City officials made the decision to include the museum in the project in order to attract more people to the downtown area, which means the entire structure must be LEED silver certified, O'Brien said.
City funds will be saved by housing city offices in the same building as the museum, which is overseen by the city parks and recreation department, O'Brien said. The city will also save by no longer paying rent on the existing museum and art center space on West Third Avenue, according to recreation supervisor Lori Moholt-Phillips.
Other perks the new museum space provides are a substantial increase in square footage that allows for a bigger classroom space, a larger collection room and a repository that can be used to store historic artifacts accepted from the public, Moholt-Phillips said.
She said moving the often delicate artifacts and artworks over to the new space, which should begin in October, shouldn't be a problem, as the museum has had to move several times before over the past decade.
Her goal is the museum is open the doors in time for their annual holiday show in mid-November.
Like O'Brien, Moholt-Phillips said she's hoping the new space will attract a higher number of people because it will be more visible.
"There are going to be huge glass doors between city hall and the new building so many people who maybe have never been to the museum downtown will be drawn over when coming in to pay their water bill," she said.