Palm Coast, FL – 135 Palm Coast city employees officially have a new place to work.
Starting at 8am Monday, the newly built Palm Coast City Hall will be open for business.
The over 41,000 square-foot facility – built on donated land – is at 160 Lake Avenue in Palm Coast’s Town Center, adjacent to Central Park.
$9.15 million dollars were spent on creating the building and the parking lots as well as on all the furnishings and fixtures.
Palm Coast Communications & Marketing Manager Cindi Lane says many of the city’s employees already moved into the new building prior to the old City Marketplace shopping center location closing for good on Friday.
“We moved the offices that don’t have much customer contact initially,” Lane added. “The customer service and building, permitting [and] zoning functions that have a lot of customer contact will be moving over the weekend.”
Even though Palm Coast has been incorporated for 15 years, the city has never had an official City Hall until now, opting instead to rent temporary space around the city as needed.
Now, most every city department will be at one location, with the bottom floor focusing for the most part on the departments that have the most direct contact with the public.
“The new Palm Coast City Hall will be a full-service facility, with customer service for paying utility bills and managing utility service, permitting, zoning, code enforcement, business tax receipts and the Business Assistance Center all located on the 1st floor,” Lane stated.
Residents will still have the option to pay their utility bills and manage their utility service at the Utility Department on Utility Drive in Palm Coast.
City Hall – which will normally be open from 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday – will also be the new home for various regularly scheduled meetings and hearings. Those include City Council meetings as well as Red Light and Animal Control hearings.
Future phases – if the city can find the funding – include the creation of a large plaza adjacent to Central Park and a promenade leading to the main entrance that would have another public plaza as well as fountains and landscaping.
A ribbon-cutting will take place at 5:15pm on November 3rd. That’s the same day that the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office will have a ribbon-cutting for its new Operations Center. That will be done in the morning.
Photos posted in this article of the new City Hall are courtesy of the City of Palm Coast.
Copyright 2015 Southern Stone Communications.