Now that the City departments of Public Works, Planning and Finance have moved across North Division Street to the new 1 Main Street Professional Center, empty space abounds at City Hall.

Given that the City has all that unused room on both the first and second floors, the burning question is: What’s it going to do with it?

Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis discussed what the City intends to do during a quick City Hall walk-through last week.

He said plans have been in the works for more than five years.

“When this building was built more than 30 years ago, it was built to be fully occupied in 30 years, so that’s what we are talking about right now,” Lewis said.

“…Planning and funding for this took place four to five years ago, but regrettably, the economy has turned bad right now. We have been socking money away for this purpose, but quite frankly we will do a lot of the work with city employee labor rather send it out to bids,” Lewis said.

Plans call for doubling the public seating capacity in the Council Chambers, in part by removing the back wall and media room. The Council dais will be moved, turned toward the northwest and raised to provide a view all the way to the back of the room.

“In the surveys we took, giving people more room for the big community meetings was a big deal. It’s always been a complaint,” Lewis said.

Today’s mayor’s office will be remodeled into the Council Conference Room. The present site of the City Attorney’s office and the Human Resources Department will be remade into administrative offices for the mayor and his staff and the council members. The old finance department will be made into two or perhaps four conference rooms, again, answering the public’s request for more meeting space.

The City Attorney will move up one floor into the old Public Works Department.

Basically, everything upstairs that is east of the entrance to Public Works will be the legal department, everything to the west of the entrance of old Public Works would be conference and meeting rooms.

“The reason for the conference rooms is that both human services and the legal department need a lot of testing rooms, and they’ve had to take a lot of people over to the jail or the library or the parks building,” Lewis said.

The Human Resources Department will move into Planning’s old suite. As for the 1 Main Professional Center, the City’s lease payment for all of the second and part of the third floor is $137,000 a month. It would like to buy that space to save money.

“We would like to float a bond and buy it, which would considerably reduce that,” Lewis said.