The Viroqua Public Record: August 11, 2026
Old City Hall gets a new lease, stakeholders hold a listening session to discuss plans and costs!
Your neighbor's guide to what's happening at City Hall — August 11, 2026
The Big Takeaway
The city is opening the floor on what happens to the old city hall site, and this week is your chance to see the plan before it goes any further. The Old City Hall Site Design Team has scheduled a listening session for Thursday, August 13, 2026, where they'll walk through the history of the project, the current design, and the timeline for what comes next.[1] If you've been driving past that lot wondering what's going in there — or you have opinions about what should — this is the meeting built for exactly that conversation. Nothing is being voted on. It's a presentation followed by a chance for residents to react while the design is still on paper.
Money Watch
• Here's the honest answer: the notice for this session doesn't include a single dollar figure. No budget, no construction estimate, no contract award, no funding source.[1] It's posted as a presentation of the site plan — history, current design, and timelines — and that's all the document commits to.[1]
• So if you're the kind of resident who wants to know what this will cost you as a taxpayer before you form an opinion, that's a fair question to bring to the session rather than something we can answer here. Anyone presenting a design and a timeline generally has cost ranges in mind, and a listening session is a reasonable place to ask for them out loud. We'd rather tell you the number isn't public yet than guess at one and be wrong.
Coming Up
📍 Airport Terminal Building
💻 In person only — no online option listed
📄 Full agenda
📍 CITY HALL LOWER-LEVEL COMMUNITY ROOM
💻 In person only — no online option listed
📄 Full agenda
Meetings are open to the public — most have a public comment period near the top of the agenda. See the city's full meeting calendar for dates beyond the next two weeks.
The Quick Rundown
• The session is a presentation, not a decision point. The notice says explicitly that no action will be taken.[1] Nothing about the old city hall site gets approved, funded, or finalized on Thursday. Think of it as the design team showing their work. - Three sets of officials may be in the room at once. The notice warns that a quorum — enough members to officially conduct business — of the Common Council, the Historic Preservation Commission, and the Tourism Commission could all be present.[1] That's a legal disclosure requirement, not a sign of a secret meeting. The notice states that no other council or committee business will be discussed.[1] - Which three bodies show up tells you something. Council, historic preservation, and tourism all having a stake suggests the site is being considered as more than just a vacant parcel to fill — the involvement of preservation and tourism interests points toward the building's history and its role in drawing visitors downtown both being part of the conversation. - There's an online option. For anyone who'd rather not come out in the evening, the session can be joined remotely.[1] The connection details are in the meetings calendar above. - What "listening session" means in practice. It's not a public hearing tied to a specific ordinance or permit, and it's not a vote. It's a lower-stakes format where the city presents and residents respond. Comments made at these sessions tend to shape what eventually reaches the Council as a formal proposal — which means showing up now is generally more useful than objecting later.
One More Thing
There's something quietly appropriate about holding a meeting on the future of the old city hall in the lower-level community room of the new city hall at 124 W. Decker Street.[1] One building's next chapter gets debated in the basement of its successor.
It's also worth noting what the design team chose to lead with. The agenda lists three things they plan to cover, and the first is "History of the project and current design" — history before design.[1] For a site that's presumably generated a fair amount of opinion over the years, starting with how we got here rather than jumping straight to renderings suggests the team knows some folks in the room have been following this a long while and want the record straight before they'll consider the drawings.
The notice also uses the phrase "to make the meeting more accessible" when explaining the remote option.[1] Small thing, but it reads like someone thought about the neighbors who want to participate and can't easily get downtown on a Thursday evening.
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A note on this issue: This edition is thin because the public record is thin. The only document posted for this period is the notice for Thursday's listening session — no council packet, no committee minutes, no financial reports. That's not unusual for mid-August, and it means the old city hall site is genuinely the main thing on the city's plate this week. If you only pay attention to one piece of city business this month, this is a reasonable one to pick.
Sources
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The Viroqua Public Record is an independent community summary of public meetings. It is not affiliated with the City of Viroqua.