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By Cole Trahan
Daily News

Hogansville’s city hall will soon be moving from the Royal Theatre to the PNC bank building at 111 High St.

Its contents will be moved from one building to the other on June 3 and 4, and its personnel will move on June 7, when the new location will be open for business, according to Hogansville Mayor Bill Stankiewicz.

The grand opening for the new city hall will be on June 28 at 6 p.m. The theater has served as the home to Hogansville city hall since 1984, according to previous reporting. In recent years, the city has worked toward finding a new home for city hall.

Stankiewicz said Hogansville had previously planned to make the move “more toward the end of June.”

According to Stankiewicz, funding to renovate the PNC bank building came from a USDA loan, a private donor, and money that the Hogansville Charitable Trust, a 501(c)3 charity, raised through its annual Hummingbird Festival. 

The Hogansville Charitable trust will also be paying off the USDA loan.

“The Trust is paying off the loan for the city so that when all is said and done in a couple of years, we’ll have acquired and redone that building at no cost to the taxpayers,” Stankiewicz said.

The Royal Theatre, where city hall currently resides, will be turned into a “multipurpose entertainment center,” according to Stankiewicz.

“Once we move, we have about a $2 million project to restore the Royal Theatre into a performing arts venue,” Stankiewicz said.

He explained that the new venue will show movies, put on plays, and have other kinds of live entertainment.

“We assume that’s going to take us over a year to complete,” he said.

Strategic partners for the Royal Theatre renovation include the Callaway Foundation and the Fox Theater Foundation. Funding will also come from SPLOST and a USDA blighted building grant administered through the DCA.