City staff told the Grand Prairie City Council that the City Hall Annex and the Finance Administration Building on Main Street will be demolished as part of a council-approved downtown redevelopment concept intended to add housing, retail and entertainment.

The concept, council members and staff said, aims to revitalize downtown but requires removing the two older municipal buildings because they contain asbestos and would be costly to renovate. “It was not possible to repurpose the old annex and finance buildings,” a City staff member said during the meeting.

Why it matters: the redevelopment plan covers several properties near City Hall and is intended to attract new housing, retail and entertainment uses to downtown. Council members and staff described demolition as a necessary step to implement the concept the City Council approved.

During discussion, a City Council member acknowledged the loss of historic structures, saying, “Everybody loves saving history,” and added that the council and staff had developed a vision that could not be achieved without removing the buildings. The council member said the buildings are “so old they have asbestos in them” and described reconstruction costs as “pretty astronomical.”

Officials also said the next phase of demolition will remove Calvary Baptist church buildings and a sonnet (described in the meeting as relocating several blocks to the west). City staff said the full redevelopment project is expected to take several years to complete; no firm timeline or detailed funding breakdown was provided in the discussion.

No vote tally or mover/second for the council’s earlier approval of the redevelopment concept was stated in the recorded remarks. The meeting record indicates the concept has been approved by the City Council, but the transcript did not include details about the formal motion, vote counts, or implementation funding sources.

Next steps mentioned in the meeting were limited to demolition and relocation plans and the longer-term redevelopment process; staff did not specify construction start dates, contract awards, or funding sources during the remarks on the record.