By Hannah Spence
The clock is ticking for South Palm Beach to devise its plan for where town offices will operate and council meetings will take place while a new Town Hall is under construction.
Although Town Manager Jamie Titcomb is confident that workers will be able to stay in the current Town Hall until the end of March, he now must figure out where staff will relocate and the Town Council hold its meetings during construction.
“Everything will be modified because it will have to be,” said Titcomb. During the council’s Aug. 11 budget workshop, he said he was working on an agreement with surrounding communities to use their facilities to hold formal assemblies like council meetings, which should be possible as long as South Palm Beach’s meetings do not conflict with another community’s own meeting schedule.
But there’s more work that needs to be done before the town will know when any relocations will take place.
“Until we get hard timelines from the architects and engineers as to when we need to do X, Y or Z, it’s hard for us to set a start date and a duration date,” Titcomb said.
“The plan doesn’t really change; it’s the timelines that are still somewhat malleable from this point forward,” he said.
Titcomb said the town may be able to have a trailer office or another type of presence either at the site or next to it during the construction. The latter would require an agreement with a neighboring condominium to provide temporary space while the project is under way.
Although Titcomb said options are limited, he’s hoping the town wouldn’t have to go farther than the neighboring communities of Manalapan, Lantana and Lake Worth Beach in finding relocation space.
“If we go much beyond that, the cost benefit ratio starts to become less and less desirable for the town because of the demographics and the efforts that are required in order to get people to whatever we are staging,” he said.
Besides government activities, Town Hall is used for community activities such as exercise classes and art shows. Whether those will be able to continue during construction will depend on factors such as the number of participants and how reasonable it is to have the activities put on somewhere nearby.
“It is also likely that we would just suspend certain kinds of programming until we are ready to host it ourselves again, so that we don’t incur large costs,” Titcomb said.
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