MARSHALL — The actual construction work at Marshall’s renovated City Hall has taken about a year to complete, but the renovation project itself has been years in the making.

Coming up with a solution for building and space needs for Marshall’s city offices meant balancing cost, timing and other public needs, said Marshall Mayor Bob Byrnes.

“We always wanted to have the right plan to serve the community for the future,” Byrnes said. “Hopefully, time will tell that it’s the right decision.”

A lack of space and other issues with Marshall’s 1964 municipal building had been on the city’s radar for a long time.

“There was a whole series of things that compounded,” Byrnes said.

“I remember one of the questions I was asked when I first ran for city council was ‘What are you going to do with City Hall?’ ” said John DeCramer. DeCramer has served on the Marshall council since 2009, and has served on some of the building committees that focused on City Hall over the past several years.

The Municipal Building, which originally served as a combination city office, fire hall, ambulance garage, police station and city court, had long outgrown some of its uses. A stand-alone fire station for the Marshall Fire Department was built in the 1970s, and the Marshall Police Department moved into the joint Marshall/Lyon County Law Enforcement Center in the 1990s. As time went on, the council chambers on the second floor also didn’t have the technology needed in order to hold and broadcast public meetings, Byrnes said. The Marshall City Council held its meetings at the Marshall Public Schools district offices for more than a decade.

The utilities and parts of the building structure at the Municipal Building had also declined over the years. Years’ worth of moisture and road salt from the former police garage had damaged part of the concrete slab forming the main level of the building, and made part of the lower level unusable, Byrnes said. The building also had problems like leaks, an aging boiler, and an elevator too small to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“There was no good way to do an easy repair,” Byrnes said. Plus, Marshall went through other big construction projects in the past several years, and city leaders didn’t want to overburden taxpayers.

The city conducted more than one study to try and find solutions to the issues facing the Municipal Building, DeCramer said. A building task force convened in 2014 recommended the building be renovated. In 2017, the city approved a proposal to hire Willmar architectural firm Engan Associates to explore options for rebuilding or renovating City Hall.

“We went back and revisited other (building) sites,” said Barbara Midgarden Marks of Engan Associates.

Renovating City Hall on Main Street would not only carry building costs, but also the costs of relocating city staff to temporary offices during construction. However, while it might have been less expensive to build a new City Hall in a different location, “Staying in the current location solves multiple problems,” Marks said. City government would still have a presence downtown, and the city would avoid having to tear down or try to sell a vacant property on Main Street. “They really made a decision to support downtown.”

In November 2019, the city approved a $4.89 million base bid from Brennan Companies of Mankato to renovate the building.

“There were some real challenges about it, and that’s not a bad thing,” Marks said of the project. One big challenge was to tear out the concrete slab forming the building’s main level and lower it about two feet to street level, said project manager John van Dyck, of Brennan Companies.

“With taking out an entire floor, there were logistics we had to work out,” van Dyck said. First, the building structure had to be stabilized, and the construction crew had to build a ramp so they could remove concrete rubble from the basement. The first floor slab was cut out in sections using specialized equipment, before being re-poured.

“We basically had robots in to cut the floor out,” Marks said.

The basement floor of City Hall was also torn out and lowered about six inches to go along with the change in the main floor level, van Dyck said.

Additional challenges cropped up partway through construction. The city had hoped the long-vacant Marshall Hotel building next door to City Hall could be redeveloped, but work on the City Hall project revealed water damage affecting both structures along their shared wall. In a separate project, the city tore down the hotel in spring 2020.

The demolition also revealed that the Municipal Building’s east wall wasn’t square — the building was several inches wider at one end than the other. After a building committee that included council members DeCramer, Russ Labat and James Lozinski considered the options, the city decided to tear out the wall and rebuild it to fix the error.

“At that point we thought, we’re in it this far, we ought to do it right,” DeCramer said.

Rebuilding the wall, and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, both meant a lot of extra logistical work, van Dyck said. But he credited workers and project superintendent Nathan Hrdlichka with keeping the renovations on track.

After spending a little more than a year in temporary office space on the campus of Southwest Minnesota State University, Marshall city offices moved back to City Hall in July 2021. The building’s new design brings high-traffic areas like the city council chambers, Marshall Community Services and the city building department down to the main floor.

“The reworking of the building really brings the services to the people,” Marks said.

The design of the building also has nods to previous city hall designs. The exterior brick and building shape echo the design of Marshall’s 1914 City Hall, and wallpaper in the main lobby resembles the pattern of the terra-cotta screen covering the facade of the 1964 Municipal Building.

“We’re proud of the project. We think it turned out well,” van Dyck said.

“I think the outside looks good, and we’ve got a lot of space for growth on the inside,” DeCramer said.

“There’s been a really positive reaction from the public,” Byrnes said.