Architects present space-needs plan for proposed Mount Juliet city hall

At a 5:15 p.m. workshop, architects James Kennan and Carrie Slat presented a high-level space‑needs assessment to the Board of Commissioners for a proposed new Mount Juliet city hall, laying out staffing projections, office prototypes, security zones and parking/site estimates.

Kennan said the firm — which completed the police station project for the city — produced three deliverables: a spreadsheet listing required spaces and staff allocations, adjacency diagrams showing how departments should relate to one another, and a site/parking analysis for developer planning. "We finally finished the police station, and, now we've been fortunate enough to be asked to help you do the space needs assessment," Kennan said during the presentation.

The consultants said they used questionnaires and interviews with department leadership to build organizational charts and asked departments to "think 20 years out" to inform projections. Kennan reported current city hall staffing of about 42 people and a 20‑year projection that "could grow up to 71 people," with growth concentrated in development services, IT, finance and select administrative positions.

Carrie Slat described the existing facility's constraints — noting it was originally built as a bank, has only one meeting room that requires escorting visitors through staff areas, and lacks dedicated storage, which leaves files in public corridors. "It was originally built as a bank," Slat said, pointing to limitations that reduce security and functional workflow in the current building.

The assessment proposes consolidating public‑facing services into a single "one‑stop shop" facility that would include development services currently housed at the Clemens Road annex. Slat said the Clemens Road annex is largely warehouse storage ("It's 81,000 square feet," she said) and that pulling development services into a new city hall could free roughly 1,500 square feet of office space at that site while leaving most warehouse uses in place.

Design guidance from the consultants centers on three founding values: security, practicality and a welcoming public presence. The team sketched four office prototypes, including an open‑workstation model allocated at about 88 sq ft per person and three enclosed office sizes for higher‑privacy work. They also proposed organizing the building into public access zones (commission chambers and meeting rooms), transaction windows and secure staff work areas to balance public service and internal security.

Shared and amenity spaces are a major driver of overall size in the consultants' analysis. Slat said the commission chamber was sized to seat about 200 people, with the chamber program taking roughly 5,000 sq ft and the lobby and accessory spaces about 4,000 sq ft. The team compared current and proposed per‑staff area, saying the existing offices equate to about 470 sq ft per staff member while the proposed facility would be about 520 sq ft per staffer once growth is included.

For site planning, the consultants showed a two‑story massing at about 20,000 sq ft per floor and provided a conservative, worst‑case parking envelope to accommodate full chamber occupancy. Slat said a ballpark figure for staff parking was roughly 37,000 sq ft and that a more likely dedicated daytime parking need is about 40 spaces, with overflow sharing possible in a mixed‑use development scenario.

In questions from the public and staff, an attendee asked whether storage already provided at the new firehouse had been accounted for. Presenters confirmed some storage exists at the new firehouse but said the Clemens Road annex would likely continue to serve much of the city's warehouse and equipment needs; about 1,500 sq ft of office space at Clemens could be repurposed if development services move to the new facility. The consultants also discussed archival and records‑management practices, noting some departments retain only one year on site and rely on scanning/digitization as a strategy.

Kennan and Slat said the detailed booklet and spreadsheet distributed to commissioners contain itemized room lists, adjacency diagrams and parking calculations, and they invited follow‑up questions from staff. The Board did not take formal action at the workshop.

The commission adjourned the workshop and announced it will reconvene at 6:15 p.m. for a public hearing on two items related to a Lebanon Road property, followed by the regular meeting at 6:30 p.m.