“We’re sitting on a pot of gold.”
Benton Mayor Fred Kondritz made that comment Monday night during a city council meeting after Commissioner Ronnie Baumgarte inquired what city officials were planning to do with the former city hall building on North Main Street.
“When you get an engineering report back and you’ve got $1.8 million in renovations to bring it up to code, to do business in, you’ve got to make a decision to go on to someplace else and that’s what we’ve done here,” Kondritz explained.
Kondritz said the old city hall building is for sale, but not before the new police department is built.
“This day and age, franchise companies or people who want to buy property don’t have to send someone from Chicago or fly someone in from L.A. to look at city hall. You’ve got GPS and they can look at their computers and view city hall. There’s over 8,000 cars that pass city hall in one day,” he continued. “We have people that are interested.”
Kondritz said that he met with two organizations earlier in the day interested in the prime real estate location.
“When people buy high class offices they want a place that is visible, that has good traffic and that is close to the interstate. We have all this. City hall ideally won’t be sold until we can get a police station built, and we will not move the police department until they are ready to move into a new building,” he added.
Kondritz said moving a police department requires several legalities, although he declined to get into specifics.
Finance Commissioner Dennis Miller interjected the city has contracted with Raubach Appraisal Services, based in West Frankfort, to conduct an appraisal of the old city hall once the building has been vacated. City officials reportedly had an appraisal done on the building about 10 years ago.
“The appraisal and the agreed to selling price are going to be different, way different to our advantage,” Kondritz said. “Just because the building appraises out to a low six-figure number doesn’t mean it won’t be sold for more than that.”
“If John Doe wants to come in tomorrow and buy it for an X number of dollars they’re welcome to buy it, but it’s contingent on the police department being built.”
Commissioner Don Storey emphasized that all the contracting and sub-contracting work for the new police department building, being constructed on the lot of the old Scout cabin, will be done locally.
