The Flowery Branch City Council held its first meeting in the newly opened City Hall building Thursday.
The building has been under construction since January of 2017 after first being approved almost two years to the day prior to its grand opening.
The two-story, more-than $5 million structure sits on Pine Street just a block away from the previous city hall building on Main Street. Mayor Mike Miller spoke before the meeting during the city's open house event held to commemorate the new building.
"I love it," Miller said. "It fits with downtown, it's functional, it serves our purposes that we need it to, it allows us room to grow. It was very well thought out."
Other local officials from other jurisdiction were in attendance for the ribbon-cutting and open house, including Hall County Board of Elections Member Craig Lutz and Lula Mayor Jim Grier. Gainesville City Finance Director Jeremy Perry, who was the Flowery Branch Finance Director in 2016 who helped city officials plan the funding for the project, was also in attendance.
The building houses the council's meeting rooms, office space and a public lobby on the top floor. In the bottom floor, with an entrance off of Railroad Avenue, are the new Flowery Branch Police Department headquarters, which Police Chief David Spillers said are a big improvement over their prior facilities.
"We could be no more happy than what we are with what with we have been blessed with," Spillers said. "We actually have public restrooms."
He said that the increased space allows for designated evidence and dressing rooms for the department, which it previously did not have. He said the building also provides logisitical functions for the department.
"We have a lobby that is spacious and as inviting as a police department lobby can be. We have a private entrance in the back where, if we have to talk to a victim of a crime, we can have that victim brought in through the back entrance and not paraded in public," Spillers said.
The new building was not approved without disagreements among city council members, some of whom thought the city should have spent less money on the facility. Miller, one of the project's vocal proponents, said that it was rewarding to walk thought the building after the two-year-long process.
"It's nice. It's a relief, I was down here last night taking care of some business and just walking around the outside of it, just looking," Miller said. "It looks like it's always been here."
