State College Borough Council appears ready to name the public plaza outside the borough municipal building, 243 S. Allen St., for the late Mayor Bill Welch.
At a non-voting work session Friday, all seven council members indicated they support the naming idea. It would attach Welch’s name to the brick-paved public meeting and social space between the municipal building itself and the South Allen Street sidewalk.
Precise wording for a proposed plaza name has yet to be worked out, but should be finalized before Dec. 6. That’s when the council may vote on a formal resolution to create the distinction.
‘It is a very social area of the community,’ council member Theresa Lafer said of the open-air plaza. She emphasized that people often meet and talk there, and that the community hosts public gatherings in the space.
Dedicating that area to Welch, ‘who was verbal and social and outgoing, … is really very fitting,’ Lafer said.
Welch died Sept. 4, 2009, after serving nearly 16 years as State College mayor. He was 67 and running unopposed for reelection when he died from complications after leg surgery at Hershey Medical Center.
On March 1, a council proposal to name the borough building itself for Welch failed in a 3-3 vote. At the time, dissenters voiced varying concerns. Council member Tom Daubert said he didn’t think the building should be named for anyone; council member Jim Rosenberger said he thought the matter was being rushed, according to a Centre Daily Times report.
More recently, council member Peter Morris, who supported the building-naming idea in March, asked for the matter to return to the council agenda. And so council President Ron Filippelli reintroduced the issue to discussion on Friday.
Again, the building-naming idea failed to win majority support. Filippelli, Morris and council member Don Hahn said they supported the concept; council members Daubert, Lafer, Rosenberger and Silvi Lawrence said they opposed it.
Rosenberger said he wasn’t comfortable with naming the facility for ‘one of the mayors who works out of this building.’ Similarly, Lafer said that ‘I’m somewhat uncomfortable about naming the building after anyone.’
But Hahn argued that ‘this mayor (Welch) is different because this mayor is the inaugural mayor for this building and, by the way, for this (council) chamber, over which he presided for a lot of time.’
Welch was mayor as the borough planned for its new municipal building, which opened nearly a decade ago, and he helped to shepherd the borough government into the new space.
Finding no unanimity over the building-naming suggestion, the council moved on to achieve consensus on naming the plaza. Borough Manager Tom Fountaine said the plaza idea had been raised in earlier council conversations.
The council favored it over two other suggestions. One would have renamed Willard Circle for Welch, whose boyhood home was on the East College Heights street.
The other would have named the Borough Council chambers, on the third floor of the borough building, for Welch.
Council members talked preliminarily about pursuing public art or other nuanced touches for the borough-building plaza. The idea would be to personalize the space, to make it more reflective of Welch, they said.
Once the plaza has been named, Hahn said, he would like to see the borough consider naming other town facilities for past influential leaders. He would even support naming something for Daubert, with whom he sometimes disagrees, Hahn said.
It would be best to make such a suggestion after Daubert has passed away, Hahn said.
‘That way, he won’t object to it.’
