PROVO, Utah (ABC4) – A brand new state-of-the-art city hall is celebrating its grand opening this Saturday.
The new Provo City Hall will be hosting a free event on July 2 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. featuring live music, refreshments, building tours, a ribbon-cutting ceremony and more.
The new city hall was approved back in 2018 after residents voted for a $69 million bond to fund the facility. Officials say the old Provo City complex dated back to 1972 and was struggling to maintain its “dilapidated condition” and was unable to withstand a moderate earthquake.
Officials say Provo’s population has since tripled, rendering the existing building insufficient enough to serve citizens with the needed “flexibility, efficiency or convenience for citizen service delivery.”
The new city hall boasts five stories and 204,000 square feet featuring a private lobby for crime victims, a secure evidence room, in-house crime lab, and a coordinated public safety building with a fire and police administration and a state-of-the-art emergency operations center.
“My first question after taking office was how citizens could be served better,” said Mayor Michelle Kaufusi. “Most concerning was the characterization of our current public safety facility as a ‘building in failure. Our priority is to keep citizens safe, so not heeding the advice of the police and fire chief wasn’t an option. We needed a city hall capable of meeting Provo’s public safety needs—and we are grateful to our citizens who also saw the need.”
“Provo City Hall was designed as an ‘essential facility,’ meaning it must remain in continuous use, particularly in response to a natural disaster,” said project director Scott Henderson. “To meet these stringent requirements, it was designed per the highest risk category prescribed by the building code. In short, when or if a disaster strikes, we can remain operational for our citizens.”
The multi-million dollar bond used to fund the city hall also included funds for a new fire station in North Provo that will serve citizens for the next 60 years.
