The City of Fontana will tear out its existing 27,000-square foot City Hall which has existed since 1964 and replace it with a structure of roughly 45,000 square feet.
Going with the old building is some history city officials and residents would like to remember, some history city officials and residents would like to forget and some lessons taxpayers might lose sight of at their own peril.
City officials intend to have the new edifice ready for occupancy two years from now – in January 2028 – a reasonable target but one that might not be met.
The city is spending $58 million to construct the new municipal accommodations, which is intended to house virtually all of the city’s departments other than its police department. It will provide quarters for the fire department, with offices for the fire chief, battalion chiefs and fire administration, within its expanse.
Though some are hailing the construction of a new City Hall as one that is welcome and past due, there are others who consider the undertaking to be self-indulgent and overblown. They consider the existing civic facility to be adequate if somewhat undersized and far from having eclipsed its useful life. They question why the city is going to knock it down and build a new one when it could instead keep it in place and augment it with an annex at cost of around have that of the $58 million the city is going to expend to recreate an edifice from scratch.
The project’s general contractor is PENTA Building Group.
The city is using Fontana Senior Engineer Christopher Smethurst and Lindsay Lomeli, who was recently hired by PENTA Building Group Construction Corporation after having left Uprite Construction Corporation in Los Angeles, as the  project managers.
City officials offered somewhat contradictory statements as to who is responsible for the project’s design. City officials acknowledge that the architectural firm Carrier Johnson + Culture did design work on the project. Nevertheless, Assistant Fontana City Manager Phil Burum in October told the Fontana Herald News, “Rather than having an architect design it, go through the plan, get bids approved, bid for contractors and then ultimately construct it, we lumped it all together with one team and a contractor involved in the design process to compress the development schedule and then also get the most efficient product we could get.”
For the mnemonically-gifted or, depending on how you look at it, the mnemonically-afflicted, the city razing of the existing City Hall is somewhat galling.
In 1982, then-City Manager Jack Ratelle committed the city to a $769,800 renovation of the then-18-year-old City Hall. He gave members of the city council assurances that he would be able to get the job done on the cheap by getting discounts on several elements of the work that had to be done to complete the job, but was unclear as to the specifics. What Ratelle had in mind was that a handful of unofficial trades with contractors and developers by which he had given them assurances project proposals they had in the pipeline would get “expedited” treatment with the city’s planning division in exchange for work on the City Hall renovation to be done at cost or no cost with the city paying for materials.
The project was completed in 1983 and its cost defrayed through transfers and “borrowings” from multiple municipal funds and accounts, including one for $336,000 in one fell swoop from the city’s sewer bond debt reserve fund which Ratelle did not bother to inform the council about.
Eventually, a small group of civically-minded residents discovered that the amount of money in the city’s sewer fund had precipitously dropped from $668,000 to $332,000, without any indication of a disbursement for purposes related to wastewater treatment or the city’s sewer or effluent conveyance systems. Ongoing development at that time was placing a burden on the city’s existing sewage treatment system, necessitating, ultimately, increases in the sewer service rates charged to domestic, commercial and industrial users. After residents and businesses brought the vanishing of money from the city’s sewer fund to the attention of the city council, council members demanded an explanation from Ratelle. Without acknowledging explicitly that the money had been used for the City Hall expansion project, Ratelle assuaged the city council by suggesting that was the case, whereupon the city council acceded to a citizen committee’s recommendation that the city discontinue using money in sequestered municipal accounts intended or earmarked for specific purposes, such as the sewer fund, to pay for unrelated municipal projects and programs, such as the City Hall expansion.
In late 1983, at the city council’s direction, Ratelle and then Finance Director Ed Luekemeyer transferred $400,000 that had been appropriated for civic projects unrelated to maintaining or expanding the sewer system back into the sewer bond debt reserve fund. This was seen by many knowledgeable residents as an admission by city officials that the city was gouging its residents in charging them for the provision of basic services and diverting the inflated proceeds for unauthorized and illegitimate purposes and uses. In response, the city council, Ratelle and other top administrators offered an assurance that the money the city was taking in was being well spent. They said the City Hall expansion was intended to promote the civic center’s usefulness for another half century or beyond, perhaps extending City Hall’s life to the century mark in 2064.
It is clear from what the current city council is doing that its members do not believe they need to honor the commitments made by their predecessors in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Some have suggested that the mayor and current members of the council – Acquanetta Warren, John Roberts, Jesse Sandoval, Phil Cothran, Jr. and Pete Garcia – are throwing economic conservatism to the wind largely because they see an opportunity to provide themselves with a form of immortality of a sort – getting their names on the cornerstone of the new City Hall, a shrine that will outlive them and perpetuate their renown, at least in Fontana, until the 22nd Century.
While Warren, Roberts, Sandoval, Cothran and Garcia are intoxicated with the idea of their grandchildren’s grandchildren being able to proudly point out to their contemporaries who their great-great-grandmother or great-great-grandfather was, the cost the cost the city is taking on is sobering.
Revizto, Tech 24 Construction and MannLee Building Materials are in rough concurrence that constructing a 45,000-square-foot public building, such as a library, community center, or government office typically ranges from $13.5 million to over $26 million, based on average commercial costs of $300 to $600+ per square foot. Allowances for a deviation in cost is made for construction specialized public buildings, such as police stations, which can reach upward to $580/square foot, since complex community facilities can and often do fall on the higher end of the stated range. This is consistent with the cost Fontana city officials spoke about when they were discussing the City Hall project as recently as two years ago, when the figure[s] $27 million-to-$29 million were being thrown around.
At this point, the price tag has more than doubled, reaching $58 million. Approximately calculating that the currently existing City Hall’s 27,000 square feet represent 60 percent of the 45,000 square feet of the new City Hall, given that the yet-existing but now empty quarters remain fully functional, the value of the facility to be torn down is $34.8 million.
It has been observed that three of the members of the council are current or former government employees who are provided with generous and/or comfortable salaries and benefits or pensions paid for by the taxpayers.
Councilman Pete Garcia, who works for the State of California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, draws a $194,572.36 salary and $58,719.30 in benefits for an annual total compensation of $253,291.66.
Councilman John Roberts, who is retired as a firefighter with San Bernardino County, draws an annual pension of $137,240.91
Mayor Acquanetta Warren, who is a retired municipal employee primarily with the City of Upland, draws an annual pension of $98,421.24, based on her 24 years and 7.5 months as a city official.
Councilman Jesse Sandoval, who is a retired municipal employee with the City of San Bernardino, is pulling an annual pension of $69,862.07.
In this way, a majority of the city’s current decisionmakers, as government employees or former employees in the public sector who do not or did not feel the pinch of taxation in the same way that the majority of city residents, who are employed within the private sector and are subject to the vicissitudes of not just their own tax burden but taxation as levied upon their private sector employers. It is the mayor’s and city council’s easy come, easy go relationship with and perception of public money that might account, some believe, in the way in which the city is willing to knock down a building worth $34.8 million to replace it with one costing $58 million.
For Mayor Warren and councilmen Roberts, Cothran and Garcia, all of whom are Republicans, the razing of the existing City Hall harbors a highly personalized bonus. Doing so will allow for the removal of famed Italian sculptor Michele Paszyn’s 40-inch high by 32-inch by 16-inch cast bronze bust of John F. Kennedy, mounted on a 49-inch high by 33-inch by 25-inch granite-faced plinth on a stepped concrete base that was dedicated on November 22, 1964, one year to the day after Kennedy’s assassination and publicly unveiled on December 6, 1964. It has remained in front of City Hall ever since. Kennedy was a Democrat.