At the last Auburn City Council meeting of 2016, only the tops of council members heads were visible from the front row as their other ends were firmly settled into seats matched to the previous, shorter dais.

But taller chairs are on the way, City leaders say, and when those arrive, people in the newly remodeled, expanded council chamber inside City Hall may eyeball more than just the heads of their elected officials, even from row 1.

What created this visual was the last project in the $335,000 overall phasing and updating of the 38-year-old City Hall, which has also replaced outdated audio-visual equipment inside the council room and rebuilt the atrium at the front of the building. The atrium had been leaking, creating costly problems with the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

Council members approved the bulk of the $335,000 in funding in the 2013-14 biennial budget, but when other matters took priority, the City put the project off for several years.

As Dana Hinman, the City’s chief administrative officer explained, the previous council chamber configuration was “outdated in many ways.”

So, to accommodate all of the internal training meetings, the meetings of numerous outside organizations, the small conferences and such that put the room in high demand, the City decided to make the council chamber larger, and a bit more flexible.

Following Architect Dave Clark’s design, workers punched out a few walls, redid the layout, eliminated an oddly-shaped back office – a funky vestige of previous re-modelings – created a new storage room and modernized with new equipment the studio in the back of the chambers. In that studio are the City’s TV station, and the video and audio equipment it uses to tape and live-stream city council meetings.

Although the council approved a $335,000 budget for the overall project last July, City leaders expect the final cost to come in below that figure.

“Typically, most of our projects – like the atrium project – come in about $20,000 under budget, and there was another project we had done in another City facility. So, we had somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000 in unspent funds from other projects that we were able to apply to this as well,” Hinman said.

“We had two pots of money. One was the money for the construction and remodeling, and the other was for the audiovisual things, which we paid for with Comcast cable tax monies we’ve been collecting for like 10 years. I don’t think we’d spent any money out of that fund before this,” Hinman said.

As of now, the project has reached the final items on the punch list.

“One of the last of the punch-list items is for workers to finish staining the dais. We couldn’t attach the name plates to the front and had to have them on top of the dais last week,” Hinman said. “We will continue to make some adjustments to the new room so it looks and feels comfortable to everybody.”

The City Council awarded the construction contract to McConkey Construction in late July 2016.