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.