It is a sparse utilitarian design, without the dog-leg curve that, for some obscure reason, James Norman wanted in the Norman Castle. It is architecturally parallel to the utilitarian lines of the Ramp, and for that we are thankful, if it ends up built.
That busy stuff in the "architecture" of City Hall is awful, pretentious, and awfully pretentious. It must have appealed to James Norman. Otherwise the thing would have looked different. I know of nobody else stepping forward saying, "I had a say in it ending up looking as it does."
Here are the Scans. Click a thumbnail image to enlarge and read. Footprint first.
With luck the city website will post better full-page scans. Until then, this is it, folks.
Fourteen Million Dollars. Allegedly. How firm that figure is, guess and see.
Alleged to be funded from shaking various tax trees, federal, state, county and Ramsey.
Adding nothing to tax base, (since it is to be government owned-operated).
The "smart growth" paradigm Met Council pushes, is "walkable community" and "transit hub oriented" with sufficient neighboring "dense housing" to produce a ridership.
It's walkable from the house, 3 mi., one way.
_______UPDATE________
NOTE: Though not deleted, prior wording as bracketed, is in error. See the update to this link, indicating there is a planned skyway from the train stop to the Ramp, so that all the speculated hardship in brackets is intended at present to be avoided. [Fourteen million bucks will not even include a dry walk, via skyway, from train to ramp. You have a skyway walk between sides of the tracks. But you slog through the winter slush and summer heat and pouring rain from the ramp to the other side of the street, to the rail site. Ditto, from the rail site to the ramp.]
All that luxury and empty vaulted space in the bureaucratic palace. Citizens slog it. Ramsey. James Norman. The old council.
That rail-stop concept is not all from the new men on council. Apparently it predates the last election cycle. Possibly it predates the last two cycles.
At least it treats the citizens better than County Hall - Tenth District Court Center, in scenic downtown Anoka, where the covered ramp parking spaces are all reserved for judges, Dan Erhart, and other bureaucrats. The public parks on top in whatever weather Minnesota offers. Bureaucrats there don't scrape windshields. Citizens do.
In Ramsey, will the top level of the Big Ramp ever be used? In my lifetime, it is doubtful. When that Met Council "million more people" projection happens, if ever, and the huddled masses move into the seven county metro area, by then who knows?
Yes, they invented a number, and doing that, why not invent a nice round number, one million more - and then the planners sitting at Met Council headquarters having little else to do to pass time, play allocation games, of the million, so many to Ramsey, so many to Lake Elmo. Have they contracted planning staff in the hard times when public sector jobs are falling like trees in a tornado? It's an interesting question. I suspect the answer is the initial stimulus money from DC prevented the awful possibility that the Met Council planning bureaucracy would be shrunk, or that the nice benefit package would be lessened. Citizens, salute Met Council.
There is this, online.