AURORA-The City of Aurora has opened its new $75 million Aurora Municipal Center at East Alameda Parkway and Chambers Road. The 285,670-sf center at 15151 E. Alameda Parkway has five stories and houses about 600 of the 2,500 city employees; it was designed by Barber Architecture and built by the Weitz Co.

The building is almost triple the size of the old Aurora Municipal Building at 1470 S. Havana St., which has served as the city hall since 1976. The new building serves as an anchor to Aurora's growing city center and evolving civic campus, which also includes the Aurora Municipal Justice Center, the Aurora Police Department, the Aurora Public Library's central library location and the Aurora History Museum.

The facility's floor plan is designed for maximum ease of use for both the public and employees by locating similar services adjacent to each other, and placing the most often visited departments on the lower two floors, which are accessed from a two-story lobby. In addition, the AMC allowed for the consolidation of more than a dozen off-site offices leased by the city at a cost of about $450,000 annually.