Dearborn City Hall was built in 1922.

For 90 years, the corner of Michigan and Schaefer has been the home of Dearborn City Hall.

Now, it appears that could change.

The Dearborn Press & Guide on Sunday reported that a proposal to combine administrative offices for the city and Dearborn Public Schools is getting serious consideration.

Call us nostalgic, but Dearborn’s City Hall building needs to remain the hub of Dearborn. The building may need repair but it is simply too important of a symbol to this city to simply leave it to others (like an art community) or, worse yet, raze.

Dearborn City Hall was built in 1922. According to Press & Guide editor J. Patrick Pepper, the parking garage behind City Hall is “falling apart and could require a complete rebuild within the next couple years. An addition put on in 1981 that connects the main City Hall building on Schaefer Road to the western annex also is in need of a new roof liner.”

Dearborn Public Schools administration is currently is housed in the 1950-vintage Ten Eyck facility on Audette. The Press & Guide reports that the former school building has “several structural issues that need to be remedied. For one, the roof leaks in some places and needs to be replaced. Even more pressing is a settling foundation on the backside of the building that has started to cause significant cracking in the cinder block walls.”

“Those are very major expenses that will need to be address so if there are opportunities to save money we’re definitely interested in exploring our options,” DPS Spokesman David Mustonen told the Press & Guide.

So where would Dearborn City Hall and the Dearborn School District relocate?

Top on the list is the old ADP Detroit sales headquarters on Michigan Avenue. Dearborn Mayor John B. O’Reilly, Jr., told the Press & Guide that the property is about to revert to bank ownership and that within the next few weeks it should be on the market at a bargain-basement price.

The building is located across the street from Ford Motor Co. world headquarters and sitting adjacent to a nearly half-mile-long campus of other municipal properties, the move would consolidate all of the city’s biggest entities into one central location, the Press & Guide says.

The idea of combining administrative offices has been on the table for several years and was one of the considerations in 2003 when the city spent $2.3 million to purchase the 5.9-acre parcel between the ADP building and Henry Ford Centennial Library, the paper says. Part of the purchase agreement with Ford Land Development Co. was that the property, which is a grassy field, had to be turned into an office space within 15 years.

The Press & Guide says Dearborn could have a potential buyer for City Hall in the developer ArtSpace, which is looking to establish a live/work facility for artists in Dearborn. The mayor recently gave the Minneapolis-based nonprofit a tour of City Hall. With its big windows and tall ceilings, the Georgian-Revival style building fits a lot of criteria ArtSpace looks for in a redevelopment project.

“The timing of this is extremely good when you look at all the factors from the efficiencies too possible savings,” O’Reilly told the Press & Guide. “But we’ll do a thorough evaluation of it and if it works we’ll pursue it and if it doesn’t we won’t.”