The fate of City Hall isn’t set in stone yet.

A city council committee, composed of chairman and council member John Workman, council members Katrina Wilson and Mike Spillane and Mayor Dan Marabello, who was absent, met Nov. 18 for a public hearing on the future of the building.

“All options will be considered,” Workman said.

That includes one that wasn’t on the table the last time the committee met, when they chose to recommend that the planning and zoning department come back to City Hall instead of the billing staff and cashiers.

Instead of the billing department moving into City Hall itself – a setup that city employees said would be cramped and quickly outgrown – it could move into the detached building that the finance department currently occupies.

The smaller finance department would move into City Hall, leaving the billing department with a larger space that has room to expand when they need to hire more employees.

He made that announcement after all three people who spoke at the public hearing – former city manager Richard Carmean, new Downtown Milford Inc. president Scott Angelucci and Dolce Bakery owner Chuck Stanko – supported moving billing back downtown.

As city manager, Carmean was one of the people who decided to move city services out of City Hall in the first place. He said on Tuesday that’s he’s realized he made a mistake.

“I came to believe that city services worked better with one-stop shopping (at the Public Works facility),” he said. “I was thinking like a manager, not like a citizen.

“When I stopped thinking like a manager and started thinking with my heart, I realized if we as a community wanted to maintain a valuable and vibrant downtown, we need to maintain a city presence.”

He added that if he’d tried to build an addition onto City Hall and move everyone back, as originally planned, the city staff would have outgrown it within five years. He got the council’s approval to remove that addition from the plans before work started, but keeping city services out of City Hall permanently was never put to a vote.

“Please don’t jump to an easy fix that will work in the short run, but will not meet the needs of our city and customers for the future,” he said.

Scott Angelucci, who recently took over as the president of Downtown Milford Inc., was the second speaker. He pushed for the government to keep City Hall active however it would be most effective.

“We feel strongly that the city should maintain its presence downtown,” he said. “What we’re hoping to do is to see a portion of the city come back.”

Angelucci also presented a letter from former city planner Karen Brittingham, who wrote in support of moving the billing department downtown. She wrote that City Hall continues to be important as a symbol of the city government, and that she would rather see the billing department move back downtown. She added that she knows from experience that the city planner’s office benefits from a close relationship with the utility staff, and that the billing department should be the one to come back.

Stanko said his business, like others in the downtown area, lost customers when the city operations left for Airport Road, and that bringing them back would help encourage new businesses to come to the area.

Workman said the committee will meet again when the city has had a chance to study its options.

“We will make sure we have all the facts, and then we will make a recommendation to city council,” he said.