Stabilizing a 135-year-old downtown building is expected to cost millions of dollars — the question now is how much money does the city wants to spend, if any, so people can once again go inside.

At Guelph’s committee of the whole meeting Monday, Oct. 4, council got its first look at the staff proposal for what to do with the Drill Hall on Farquhar Street, built in 1866 and vacant since 2006.

As previously reported by the Mercury Tribune, city staff say $4.5 million is needed to stabilize the hall — more than double the $2 million originally budgeted for the project when the city took possession of it as part of a land swap with Metrolinx.

Ian Scott, the city’s manager of facility design and construction, told council that was because once crews got to working on the hall, they found the building was in worse shape than they thought.

“There’s missing columns for the building that should have been there for the last 20 years and they’re not, and they’re contributing to the overall deteriorated state of the building,” he said, pointing to one of the problems discovered.

Because of issues such as this, he said, the building “needs to be stabilized as soon as possible.”

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