The Huntsville city hall annex, the sister building adjacent to the towering administration building on Fountain Circle, will soon be torn down.

The building, which has been closed and fenced off for several months, is costly to keep online and General Services Director Jeff Easter said the city is under an order from the state to remove its long-dormant elevators.

The city council approved on Thursday a $45,000 contract with Fuqua & Partners to design a plan to remove the building.

The building - part of the municipal complex built in the 1960s - formerly housed the city jail as well as the police department, fire department and municipal court.

It's also on the site of a planned private development that's part of a downtown master plan adopted by the city council earlier this year. Eventually, the master plan calls for a new city hall to be built on the site of the current parking deck across Fountain Circle from the current city hall.

In advocating for the building to be torn down, Mayor Tommy Battle told the council the jail on the top floor "is a creepy place."

"It's time to get rid of it," Battle said. "It's going to be a blight in the future and it's very costly for us to keep up right now. It has a lot of old memories for some of us who were around a long, long time ago. But its memories are not outweighed by the cost."

Easter said the demand from the state to remove the elevators should expedite the building's removal, though the design contract would be in place for whenever the council determined to remove the building.

"It would be our recommendation that we demolish the building sooner rather than later," he said. "We are currently under demand by the state of Alabama to remove the elevators in the building. There is a state law that says elevators can be out of service for only a limited amount of time and we have exceeded that time.

"There is a cost to remove elevators to comply -- $20,000. We don't feel it's prudent to pay $20,000 to remove the elevators and then turn around and demolish the building."

There is more to removing the building that simply tearing it down, City Administrator John Hamilton said. The sister buildings are tethered by utilities and the elevation drop from Fountain Circle to the annex's ground level on Church Street could cause safety issues that must be addressed.

And, Hamilton said, the cost to keeping an unused building online is unwise.

"Even if council took a vote and said we never want to build a new city hall, we would still need to demolish that annex portion of the building because of its condition," he said. "It will be a complex demolition project. It will have to be done in a way that the existing city hall is preserved."