In our series on the 2025 Community Excellence Award applicants, learn more about a Michigan community’s innovative example of adaptive reuse. With City employees crammed into closets and sharing rooms, the City of Douglas repurposed a disused hospital building as spacious and accessible municipal offices, all while freeing up valuable space downtown.  

2025 Community Excellence Award Entries: Adaptive Reuse

Things were getting tight in Douglas. The municipal offices of this lakeside Allegan County city of about 1,400 people were starting to resemble a very professional, efficiently run can of sardines. People were occupying closets, doubling up in cramped offices, struggling to find space for conferences and webinars, and sharing the Chamber room. “It gets loud,” says Project Manager Jenny Pearson. “We have to eat at our desks.”

Recognizing the value of municipal employees’ sanity, the City has been working towards a new home. The target is the former site of Holland Hospital located at 415 Wiley Road, previously an outpatient facility that had sat empty for years. “You’ll talk to older people around town and hear about, ‘Oh, I was born in that hospital,’ but I’ve been here since 1986 and the hospital was already closed, so it’s sat vacant for a long time,” says Chief of Police Steve Kent.

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It will almost double the City’s current office space, giving employees a more comfortable workplace, Douglas residents more convenient “one stop shopping” for municipal services, and the City room to grow for the future.

The City of Douglas’ submission for the 2025 Community Excellence Award, the “Douglas Civic Retrofit” is a prime example of adaptive reuse. The hospital building is being fully renovated as a new City Hall, Police Department, additional space for DPW and the fire department, and a large garage addition so that police officers will no longer need to dig their squad cars out of the snow. It will almost double the City’s current office space, giving employees a more comfortable workplace, Douglas residents more convenient “one stop shopping” for municipal services, and the City room to grow for the future.

A somewhat metaphorical, but extremely West Michigan “groundbreaking ceremony” took place in January 2025. “We were supposed to have the ceremony outside, and it was cold as all get out, like negative-20 degrees that day,” says Pearson. “So, we brought a bunch of dirt inside on a tarp and let them take the shovels and just move the dirt around, because we couldn’t really ‘break ground.’”

“The dirt would have been frozen outside,” added Chief Kent.

Far from the spooky gothic edifice of some former hospitals, the Wiley Road location is a warm, modern, spacious building with large windows and green space out in front. At just one floor, it’s easy to access for everyone (although I was sad to learn that the new fire station wouldn’t have a cool fireman’s pole to slide down). City Hall employees will get break rooms and conference spaces and will no longer need to bunk up in closets. Police officers will get much-needed locker rooms and shower facilities. There will be practical additions like biohazard clean-up, generators, and a large, versatile community room. And there’s plenty of storage space in the basement in the former morgue.

With construction bid out to CarbonSix, the project has come along quickly, and City employees are eager to move into their new digs in November of 2025, with an official ribbon-cutting to happen in December. “There’s a lot of excitement around this project,” says City Manager Lisa Nocerini.

The first phase of the project cost about $3.2 million. There have been no added taxes or mills imposed upon Douglas residents to fund the retrofit. “The City was not going to move forward with a project of this magnitude unless they can pay for it without hitting people’s pockets,” says Nocerini.

Funding for the retrofit has been handled entirely in-house with the sale of several city properties. These include the downtown locations of the old City Hall and Police Department, the latter of which has already been sold for mixed-use retail and residential, and the former Nocerini imagines as a restaurant or a neat little boutique hotel.

“Normally, you look at cities and say, ‘Why do you have so many properties?’” says Nocerini. “In [Douglas’] case, it worked out to our benefit to hold those properties, so that we could use them as an investment tool in the future and ensure that we could grow.”

“It’s really culminating into the perfect plan.”

Author

Emily Landau

Emily is the League’s full-time Content Writer, composing emails, articles, blog posts, and press releases. If you need words, she has many. Prior to becoming a word person, she was a restaurant person, handling catering, event management, and marketing; prior still, she was a teaching person, at a private boarding school in Massachusetts. Having earned a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Georgia, Emily is confident that she is the only League employee fluent in Latin. She also enjoys cooking, stand-up comedy, and is an avid gamer, having achieved level 40 on her Steam profile.