POULSBO — When the Greater Poulsbo Chamber of Commerce opened its doors Wednesday night to a community conversation about the location of city hall, only one side entered the discussion.

Of the 14 people in attendance at the discussion led by chamber executive director Stuart Leidner, two were undecided and the rest were clearly in favor of keeping city hall downtown. No one representing the 10th Avenue location was present.

“Government is the dot that connects all the dots for a community,” Bill Austin said. “If it leaves downtown, then downtown suffers big time.”

Although he had served on the committee working on the 10th Avenue city hall proposal, Austin said he quit because he didn’t believe it was the right choice.

“I’m one of the ones who helped stop this thing, and I believe city hall should stay downtown,” Austin said, as he was joined by other members of the Committee to Build City Hall Downtown.

For Denise Bauman, wife of city Public Works Director Jeff Bauman, the city hall location is just part of the larger question of the city’s future for the next 20 years.

“I don’t know what it will be like, if it will be Little Norway,” Bauman said.

Already, the city is more than its downtown core with the Olhava development and other rapidly growing areas across the city, so citizens’ views of the Poulsbo’s future will have defined impact on what it does now, Bauman said.

“I don’t believe 10th is the center of city, because we have Olhava,” Poulsbo Place resident Dolores Lynch said. “I don’t feel like 10th is the center of the future of Poulsbo.”

Austin said that if famed American illustrator Norman Rockwell were asked to paint a city’s downtown, city hall would always be a part of it.

“That’s what I see,” Austin said. “I believe we could have a city hall next to Martha & Mary, and it would once again be an icon.”

However, Poulsbo resident Ben Kirkendall, who was undecided about where city hall should be located, said Poulsbo’s downtown is different from other cities. “As a citizen who lives on the edge of downtown, I do little business at city hall,” Kirkendall said.

Most of the downtown businesses are targeted at the tourist market, and there isn’t much for city residents in terms of basic services like medical facilities, grocery stores or car repair shops in the downtown area, he said.

“The people I see downtown, they’re not Poulsbo people,” Kirkendall said.

Margene Smaaladen, an advocate for keeping city hall on Jensen, said the downtown businesses rely on city employees and people doing business at city hall to help keep them alive.

“That’s what gets shops through the winter,” Smaaladen said. “If city hall’s not downtown, there’s no reason for them to come downtown.”

Twenty years from now, the city’s population could be four times what it is now, and Kirkendall said he’s not sure if he wants that additional 15,000-30,000 people coming downtown.

If city hall moves out of that district and a developer purchases the site, it would probably be made into condos or other commercial development, resulting in more people and less parking downtown, Lynch countered.

Austin agreed parking is one of the most serious issues facing the city.

“If we should build on 10th, the existing city hall should be converted into all parking,” he said.

If city hall stays downtown, then the traffic probably won’t get any worse than it already is and the city could serve as a catalyst in resolving the area’s parking issues, Austin said.