Downey’s Civic Center Took Less by 6 Years, $112 Million

How much did it cost to build a Civic Center in Downey, where officials started thinking about a new municipal edifice complex at about the same time as Beverly Hills did?

“The whole thing, including the furniture, cost roughly $8.5 million to $9 million,” Assistant City Manager Lee Powell said.

There’s another big difference between the two projects: Downey’s was finished six years ago.

Powell said municipal workers and the public in the city of 88,000 in southeastern Los Angeles County are more than satisfied with the three-story building of glass, brick and steel, complete with a soaring atrium.

“It depends where you were before,” he said. “We used to have our City Hall in an old schoolhouse.”

Despite the relatively low cost and quick construction of the Downey City Hall, “Lord knows, things didn’t go perfectly smoothly,” Powell said in an interview. But he doubted that the lessons learned would be of much use in either city.

“We learned lots of things about building city halls, but I guess we won’t be able to use them till we’re all dead, and somebody else will have to figure it out all over again,” he said.