 Oh good afternoon everyone and welcome to the City Hall groundbreaking ceremony for the reconstruction of Sheboygan's historic City Hall built over 100 years ago. I'm David Bebel I'm the director of public works for the City of Sheboygan. I'll be your emcee for the groundbreaking event today. For an entire generation City Hall has stood steadfast and represented Sheboygan in the community well. However with age City Hall is in need of some major work and in order to continue functioning and operating for offices. So to beg the question should we invest in City Hall or should we build elsewhere build new and was quite a debate for some time. However just restoring City Hall in its current layout did not solve the problem of creating open and inviting and accessible City Hall. Bray Architects our partner listened to all the issues and debates of alternative sites constraints with City Hall at the assistance of the building use committee and their excellent guidance throughout this process. They challenged us to try to preserve City Hall if at all possible. I'm here just here today to tell you that Bray Architects with Mr. Steve Coonan Mr. Steve Yeager from Bray came through with a beautiful plan and ultimately a great project for us. It not only enhances City Hall by preserving City Hall but it also creates a new inviting open entrance on the facade of the north as you can see which really was the backside of City Hall and it's unfinished. It will be a great project once we're all said and done again accessibility will be it will be open it creates new customer service counters instead of individual offices which will open City Hall for a new modern office type of environment along with our team with EBI Emmons Business Interiors. We've been working diligently at laying out new office spaces to make it functional not only for the occupants of the building but also for the residents as they come to City Hall for business and for health. So as today City Hall has stood for 100 years and today we will start not only the new process to reinvest in our history but also our future as well. And with that I'd like to now introduce the Mayor of Sheboygan Mr. Mike Van der Steen. Thank you very much for that introduction. Mike Van der Steen happy to be here with you all and thanks so much for coming out today for this important occasion. I'd like to introduce some guests that are with us. We have Representative Terry Cosma from the 26th Assembly District. Terry welcome and Tyler Vorpago of the Assembly District from the 27th. Thank you for coming. We also have some members of the Sheboygan County Board here Bern Koch, Kirk Brower, Ed Procek thank you gentlemen and we have some previous older persons who were here today to Bill Field and Scott Lewandowski. I also would like to introduce our Council President Todd Wolfe, Todd and our Council Vice President Mary Lyndonahue and we have some other older persons here Ryan Sorensen and Marcus Savaglio. Anybody else I missed? Okay and then I'd also like to recognize our Building Use Committee. This committee did a great job in evaluating all these proposals, spending a lot of time talking about all the options with the architects and Joe Clark is here from the Building Use Committee. Joe why don't you give him a wave. Thank you for coming. Well you know after decades of discussion on the future of City Hall on April 4th of 2018 the Common Council voted unanimously to approve this project. This is a 100 year old building actually 101 years old and this improvements will improve the functionality to benefit the public and city staff. They concurred with the Planning Commission's recommendation and to stay in the current building because there was some talk of moving City Hall to another location and to build a more efficient floor plan with an entrance plaza and off-street parking north of the building rather than building a new City Hall. The original City Hall was built by Emil Construction Company at a cost of $150,000 adjusted that to be about $3.7 million today. The finished building was turned over to Sheboygan Mayor Otto Joren's at a dedication ceremony on January 27th of 1917 and it was designed by architect W.H. Blooming with W.C. Weeks the local architect is the associate architect. Staff for the current project was tasked with reviewing over 100 years of records that resided in the building and implementing our records retention policy and then they either had to pack that up or see that those records were destroyed. They also had to pack up all their offices to prepare for the renovation that begins today. All departments have moved to alternate locations for the anticipated 12 month construction period. Two office locations were secured for City Hall departments. The former social security office across the street where all the more customer sensitive actions are taken and then the administrative offices which are going to be located in the Sheboygan County Highway Department offices. During this construction period meetings of the City Committees will be relocated to meeting rooms at the Meade Public Library and the Common Council meetings will take place at the Sheboygan County Board Chambers in the Courthouse. We thank the library and the Sheboygan County Board for their assistance with these alternate meeting locations. I want to give my congratulations to all who have involved in this project. Important work was done by staff with the assistance of Bray Architects to develop an efficient floor plan and identify the furnishings, technology needs, improved accessibility, manage the architectural process and develop a realistic budget and identify temporary office sites and finally determining how to pay for the project. Today we officially turned Sheboygan City Hall over to Quash's construction to implement the plans that were drawn up by Bray and Associates Architects and look forward to returning somewhere around June of 2019 to take over the state-of-the-art offices that would be constructed inside of this 100-year-old building. Thank you very much for your attendance and thank you to everybody involved. Thank you Mayor. Next I'd like to introduce our City Administrator, Mr. Darrell Hofflin. Thank you David. You've heard already a lot of great comments about this project. Building Youth Committee in 2015 was created for the sole purpose of guiding the process. Great political leadership with the different council presidents from Don Hammond, Marilyn Donahue, Todd Wolfe during those really four-year periods, sort of during the home stretch of discussion, Bray Architects. Great job. You went through not only reviewing this set of plans, reviewing numerous plans of other locations, other existing buildings for retrofit and ultimately again with feedback from elected officials we honed in on this site. As it was alluded to, this north side will be the new front of City Hall. You can see from the drawings a lot of glass. It's our goal for this building to reflect our specific goal of being more transparent with the citizens of the City of Sheboygan and I think hopefully again with this great architecture and with the new technologies that this building will afford us as we go forward, we're really excited about those possibilities of remaining true to the citizens of Sheboygan. Regarding the financing of this project, roughly a $10.5 million project, again with council leadership we've been able to sock away, save money and a little over half of the project cost will come from savings. In the next couple weeks we'll be borrowing $5 million of that $10.5 million. So it really helped move this project forward knowing that not all of it would be a debt, new debt service for the community. As Mayor Mike and Dave Bebo identified, we're really, I really want to extend my heartfelt appreciation to City staff. It's not easy to be uprooted, especially for those that have been at City Hall for two or three decades. A lot of historic files had to be gone through records retention programs as it was alluded to, went into high gear, but ultimately the transition as late as last week, Thursday or Friday, was finalized as far as staff moving into their new temporary homes. So again, I want to extend my appreciation to City staff for their accommodation and ultimately their positive spirits and attitude as we settle in on our new location. Again, we look forward to being back here for a ribbon cutting in roughly a year. So please keep some time, roughly June of 2019 for that. So again, thank you for coming out today and look forward to participating with you with the shovels on our formal groundbreaking ceremony. Thank you. Thanks Darryl for your very nice remarks. Next I'd like to introduce to you the general contractor for the City Hall project, Qashish Construction and President for Qashish Construction, Mr. Matt Qashish. Thank you, Dave. I really can't tell you how happy I am to be here today and be a part of this project. I think I speak for our whole team when I say that we wanted this project. We wanted to be a part of helping rebuild City Hall to work with the City, work with Gray and really a number of other local contractors and subcontractors. We have a predominantly local team, SpectElectric, Clemen, a number of local subcontractors and suppliers really I think pursued this project aggressively and wanted to be a part of helping improve it downtown and really make City Hall the place we all want it to be. So we're very pleased. We don't normally get to be a part of groundbreaking speeches, so this is something that's kind of new for me. Dave told me to limit my response to like 45 minutes. So I decided not to go through a month by month schedule to make sure that we're going to be on schedule and get you in June, but just wanted to reiterate the fact that we have a great plan, a great team and we are very, very happy to be a part of this, especially after having moved our office down the street. We would have been very sad to see another contractors sign up on this project. So looking forward to getting started and to a very successful project. So thank you. Thanks, Matt for your comments. We're really looking forward to working with your team. I guess in closing, I just, you know, it's going to be a big project and it took a lot of effort from many people and I'd like just to take a brief moment here to recognize some of those people that were truly instrumental in getting the success of this project to this point so far. You know, Mr. Bernie Romer, he's our purchasing agent for the city. Not many people get to see him, but he's behind the scenes and he does all of our RFP writing and contractual type of solicitation and he helped tremendously with the abatement process that's going on currently. So thank you, Bernie. You just wave your hand so people can recognize you. Nancy Busk, our finance director. Thank you, Nancy, for finding the money. That's always important. Chad Peleshev instrumental in acquiring the Social Security Building for our temporary offices. So thank you, Chad. The city attorney Chuck Adams reviewing our contractual documents and making sure our bonds and everything is all in order. A lot of behind the scenes type of paperwork that really, there's a tremendous amount of effort that goes into it. And Chuck, during the move and a lot of things that you had to do, I know it was a lot of work, but I really do appreciate all your efforts in helping us through that process. We also have Meredith from the city clerk's office making sure our council documents were getting through to the proper committees and making sure we had the proper documentation to get the contracts in front of the right committees and making sure everything was timely and improved and obviously making sure the older persons were informed. So thank you so much with that as well. Derek from transit, you know, which transit got to do as well. We have all the parking lots around here and temporary parking and moving city employees and then allowing contractors then to come behind and coordinating all the parking efforts is quite an effort. So I think Derek from transit for all his efforts in that as well. Ryan says before my office has been a tremendous help. Clearly, there's a lot of civil and site work and with his staff has been a help as well. But I really have to really single out two important people that without their help, I'm not sure we would be here today. First is Don Sokolowski, our management analyst from the Department of Public Works. She has led the communication and coordination of all the relocation of all the offices in City Hall. And she's been able to do this with a pleasant smile and a great attitude throughout a very difficult task. And it's amazing accomplishment. So Don, thank you if you could just raise your hand. And lastly, Mike Wilmes with my staff. Mike is the superintendent of buildings and traffic for the Department of Public Works. He has been tremendously instrumental not not only with just the move, but with his staff. I think they're all inside the building, Mike, you know, it's unfortunate. I wish it could have been down here. But yeah, the staff about six or seven, eight guys and for the last month have just been moving literally 100 years of files and people and desks. It's amazing accomplishment. But not only that, Mike's knowledge of the building, its special issues. It's been a tremendous help, not only just in the design, but also as we're entering into the construction phase. Mike's been a tremendous help for me, as well as the contractor and the architects, just to get some background on certain things. So I really might thank you so much. If you could just stand up please. I'd really like to give you a round of applause. It's been a tremendous partner in this sense. I'm really grateful for all your help and you're a true friend. So what I'd like to do right now is officially break the ground. So we're going to have some groups up here. I think we'll just do this group, the speakers first. And then next mayor, I think if you'd like to invite some of the council members up and get them up. And then after that, we'll do other dignitaries as well as the city department heads. So we'll do a bunch of photos, I guess. So if you just would like to get in line and we'll start breaking the ground. Thank you. With the other aldermen in the group, please come up. Terry Kotschma, Tyler, or Pavel. Can we get our city department heads next? Rod, chief of police, big library, Derek, city attorney, city clerk, planning director, client ass. Come on up. Thanks everyone. We do have some refreshments right down the garage here. There's some cookies and some cake pops as well as some water. Please, please enjoy. Thank you.