Study: Dumfries will need new town hall

By Aileen Streng

Published: August 27, 2008

The Dumfries Town Hall — a 60-year-old metal building — is “woefully undersized” to meet the needs of the town’s staff and certainly cannot accommodate any future needs.

A new town hall is needed.

Additional space for the Dumfries Police Department, which is housed in the basement of the town hall, is at a critical level.

Not only does the department need to move into a temporary larger location now, but a new police department needs to be built in a more visible and central location within the town.

And the town’s Community Services building, located next to the town hall, needs to be restored and renovated.

Those were the major findings of a Space Needs Analysis study conducted by the MMM Design Group out of Norfolk and presented to the Dumfries Town Council on Tuesday.

“We’re not looking for any action tonight,” said Dumfries Town Manager Dave Whitlow. “We just wanted to start bringing this topic forward.”

The design group was contracted by the town last year to not only look at space currently needed by town staff but also that which will be needed in the next 20 years.

Dumfries population is projected to grow from its current 5,000 residents to 11,000 in 2015 and up to 15,000 by 2027.

“The town is experiencing a growth in population and economic development and the town’s personnel will need to increase with this growth and expanding economy,” according to the study.

“The pre-engineered metal building and the building systems have outlived their useful life,” according to the study.

“I walked around the building and couldn’t find a place to put even one other desk,” Wylie Cooke, of the MMM Design Group, told the council.

The report recommends demolishing the current town hall and building a two-story, 12,000 square-foot structure to replace it. The projected cost was listed at $3.4 million.

Renovating and restoring the town’s Community Services Building was estimated at $1 million.

“It’s a nice building. It sits well on the site here and fits into the historic theme for Main Street that you want to do,” Cooke said.

The study also recommended that the Dumfries Police Department would need 8,000 square feet of space by 2027. The estimated cost to build a police department of that size is $2.2 million and that does not include the cost of buying a piece of property to put it on.

The police department, with its 14 police officers and two administrative staffers, currently works out of 1,000-square feet of space.

After much contentious debate in recent months over the need and cost, the town council has agreed to lease 3,000-square-feet of leased space in the Triangle Shopping Plaza for three years until an alternative location is found or built.

During Tuesday’s meeting, two addendums to that lease were briefly discusses and the council is scheduled to vote on them at its September meeting.