GREATER AVENUES COMMUNITY COUNCIL Minutes
November 1, 2000 Held at the Sweet Library
Meeting Conducted by John Sittner
(Richard Leonard and Larry Rigby
were both out of town due to emergencies)
beginning 7:00 pm

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Because of time constraints on one of our presenters, we will adjust the agenda to have the presentation on the Capitol Restoration first.

David Hart - Capitol Restoration project:
I will show you the progress we have made on our master plan. I will go through the changes and stages and I will answer any questions that you have with regard to any items, including traffic, at the end of my presentation.

The restoration of the State Capitol has a lot of different phrases so that we can accomplish all we want to do. The research firm we hired, Cooper Roberts, found two early Master Plans done on the Capitol. The first was by John Olmstead, who located it where the Capital is currently. This was in 1894, which was years before they started the building in 1911. It was designed to be surrounded by a park-like setting rather than a parking lot setting we see today. In 1911 when Richard Cletting was hired to design the Capitol, he put it in the same location. He also talked about expansion and how it should take place in the future.

During the restoration of the building, which I covered in detail last month, we also want to try to add green space around it. (Currently, we have 1158 cars parking on the Capitol grounds.)

We are currently deficient in 45,000 sq. feet of space in the Capitol Building itself. These include offices for legislative research. We have several people sharing office space of 50 sq. feet. Our meeting rooms are very long and very narrow. The second problem is losing space when we make structural changes to make it structurally sound. We will lose about 31,000 sq. feet during the process. We also look at potential growth over the next 20 years. It has been determined that we will add about 2 - 4 people per year. We are looking at some groups currently in the Capitol to moving to other places outside the Capitol. Examples: the Auditor and Treasure have staffs who do not have to be there. The Attorney General does not need all his staff to be there. In the next year we will look at a demolition at a few outbuildings (described.)

As we begin reconstruction, we will be down 196 parking stalls. In phase 2 we will add two new buildings that will sit behind the Capitol and we will make the top of plaza to be green space. The Capitol Arts Commission wants a place to put statuary near the Capitol, so we intend to make it a Statuary Garden.

In this phase we estimate that we will be about 300 parking stalls short. We will add parking under one of the new buildings. In Phase 3 we will focus on the Capitol. We will place the Capitol on a "plimth" or a base so it can move independently of the ground in an earthquake.

In another phase we will green the space around the Capitol. In this phase we will be down 196 parking spaces due to the fact that we will be taking away the parking in front of the Capitol.

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