By Kris Leonhardt

MARSHFIELD – The former home of Marshfield government has been listed with a realtor. The sale of the building – known as City Hall Plaza – had previously been offered for sale through a request for proposals in an attempt to address some needs with the building and in the city.

“The property now is just basically on the market,” said Mayor Bob McManus. “Before there were RFPs – requests for proposals – and they had certain specifics of what the building needed to have in it. With that came requests that were somewhat limited. So, now we’ve just kind of opened the door to, in essence, there is a big for sale sign…”

McManus said that they do have an offer on the table now, but they do want to make sure that it is an appropriate offer for the city and that the city is not in a position where it needs to unload the building for financial reasons.

“We did receive an offer, and we are going back and forth with it,” explained McManus. “We want to get the right offer. Right now there is $340,000 worth of income that comes off of the building – about $150,000 up top and then the rest from rents, and there are other tenants that might be moving in at the beginning of the year.

“The building more than pays for itself; there are several hundreds of thousands of dollars of excess revenue there and that income helps us keep property taxes (down) and takes care of expenses that we need to within the city.

“If that was just a building with no revenue, we would be forced to take a low offer.”

City Administrator Steve Barg said that leaving the building was bittersweet and that it served its purpose for the roughly 30 years that the city departments called it home.

“For three decades (City Hall Plaza) served the city very well; it really did,” Barg said. “It is a good multipurpose facility. Not only were we able to accommodate a number of uses as far as city offices, but with a tennis and racquetball court, the multipurpose of having county facilities there – that has been helpful to people looking for social services, tallest building probably around that accommodated some cell towers for people in our community to get better cell coverage. It has really been beneficial to the community overall.”

Barg said that listing the property with a realtor will open the doors to more possibilities and expanded marketing of the property.

“I think that we are going to see more interest now that we’ve taken away this requirement that you do certain things,” Barg said. “We are no longer pushing an agenda of wanting to see some residential at the top of the building or wanting to see significant investment in any particular way to upgrading the building. We are really treated now as if you are selling your own house. We are not mandating anything be done with it.”

Rita Blenker is the listing agent on the City Hall Plaza property.