Steamboat Pilot & Today

Steamboat Springs — Deputy City Manager Wendy DuBord said Friday she is preparing to award the $180,000 bid for a sophisticated audiovisual system at Centennial Hall.

The Denver firm of Robert Stevens and Associates was the low bidder on the project, DuBord said. The audiovisual equipment will be installed in the Citizens Hall, a new meeting room for City Council and Planning Commission meetings. The meeting room, with its elevated seating for more than 100 people, also will be available for a wide variety of civic functions.

DuBord said the audiovisual equipment includes a large viewing screen that will allow people attending the meetings to see documents, maps and architectural drawings being viewed by council and commission members.

The new equipment also will allow developers, architects and engineers to bring in their documents on computer disk and load them onto the screen for public viewing.

A combined budget of $300,000 for technology and audiovisual equipment is being supplied to the Centennial Hall project by the Orton Family Foundation.

DuBord said construction on Centennial Hall, which is across 10th Street from City Hall, is continuing on several fronts. She remains confident the building will be ready for a ceremonial opening including public tours, before 2000 is over.

However the building probably won't be ready for full use until March 2001, DuBord said.

One of the most noticeable changes is that the roof of the 100-year-old power plant building has been removed. The building, which served as the city's first electrical plant, is being restored with a grant of approximately $162,000 from the state historical fund. DuBord said the building will get an entirely new roof as well as new staircases and a new floor right down to the joists on the second story.

The first story of the building will get a new concrete floor, which will contain all-new electrical wiring for the building. Despite the changes, as many of the original materials as possible are being preserved in keeping with the terms of the historic grant.

"We will preserve the existing gables and re-use as much of the interior wood as possible," DuBord said. Another aspect of the old building that will be preserved is a layer of corrugated metal decking between the first and second floors. That material will be revealed to serve as the first-floor ceiling.

Nearby, on the new portion of the building, stone masons have begun installing natural sandstone near ground level. DuBord said stone work completed this week amounted to a test run. Next week, the masons will install a section to test the appearance of more narrow bands of mortar between the stones, and with shorter runs of mortar no more than 30 inches before the line of mortar is broken up by an intersecting piece of stone.

DuBord said Centennial Hall remains on schedule and on budget.