- The Archer Community Center's future is uncertain as citizens and county officials urge the city to decide on relocating City Hall there or selling it.
- The city considers moving city hall to the community center or consolidating spaces due to a $400,000 estimated cost to update the current City Hall.
- Former mayor Roberta Lopez and others have long fought to preserve the community center as a historic, inclusive space since its 2011 opening.
- Local leaders express concern that repurposing the center for city hall would undermine its role as a community gathering place and historic monument.
The fate of the Archer Community Center remains in limbo after citizens and the Alachua County Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) pressed the Archer City Commission last week on its plans to either relocate its City Hall to the Community Center or sell it.
The potential relocation surfaced during a joint city and county meeting on Feb. 9.
The idea was proposed last year as the financially struggling city considered ways to save money and address Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance failures in the current City Hall building.
Although the option hadn’t been formally discussed by the City Commission, former interim City Manager Deanna Alltop also wrote a letter in May 2025 to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which previously gave a grant to help build the Community Center, asking if the city could sell it.
Changing the Center’s status quo received perpetual pushback from locals, including Archer-native and former mayor Roberta Lopez.
For almost a decade, Lopez labored alongside the Community Center’s 13-member committee to fundraise nearly $1 million from residents, the county and state to turn the historic Archer School’s brick gymnasium into the Center, which opened in 2011.
The space has hosted events like youth and veteran activities, weddings and adult fitness programs, serves as Archer’s only voting precinct and as a precinct for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office.
One month before passing away in February, the 87-year-old Lopez started a petition aiming to preserve the Community Center for its purpose as a gathering place and as a monument of Archer history.
“The people of Archer worked tirelessly to restore this historic building, investing time, resources and pride into its preservation,” the petition said. “We urge city officials to protect the Archer Community Center and keep it dedicated to serving the residents, families and future generations of Archer.”
During this month’s joint meeting, when the future of the Community Center came up again, Mayor Fletcher Hope said he wished the topic would die.
Because Hope said Archer couldn’t afford the $400,000 price tag estimated by staff to update City Hall, the city started considering spaces that could be consolidated to serve two purposes. City Hall would have fewer than five staff members to relocate.
Hope said renovations weren’t off the table, but that a dual-purpose space like Newberry’s Mentholee Norfleet Municipal Building could work without stopping the Community Center’s current activities.
As for selling the Center, Hope said during a regular meeting in July the prospect fit into the progression of ideas the city had been considering.
“It’s not permission, it’s just civility at this point as we recover financially,” he said.
BOCC Chair Ken Cornell and Commissioner Charles Chestnut joined in the pushback against moving City Hall.
Cornell said he understood all options had to be discussed in a state of financial emergency. But he said he hoped the city would leave each space for its intended purposes.
“The Community Center should stand on its own for the community, and City Hall should be City Hall,” Cornell said. “They are completely, totally different. I would hate that they would be dual purpose.”
Chestnut said he remembered working as a legislator in Tallahassee when he advocated for grant funds on behalf of Archer and Lopez for the Community Center. He said the project also received contributions from local entities like Butler Plaza.
On top of not knowing how the Community Center would function logistically while also serving as City Hall, Chestnut said Archer would lose what so many people, including himself, fought for as what the city needed.
“The issue that I recall we spoke about was the need for the Community Center in Archer, for the community, and to revitalize the building,” he said. “So I’m just concerned, when I hear stuff like that, that what we fought for, the purpose of it, [that’s] not going to be the purpose of it anymore.”
During Lopez’s interview with Mainstreet, poster boards, scrapbooks and tubs of newspaper clippings, artifacts, and photographs documenting the cents and labor invested in the Community Center project filled her home.
She said working to keep City Hall out of the Community Center and starting the petition was personal and on behalf of the city because “everybody gave something.”
After being elected Archer’s first Black female commissioner in 2002, Lopez said she immediately started looking into how the city could repurpose the abandoned school gym constructed in 1936 through former President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Works Progress Administration Project.
The gym was an addition to the Archer School, a whites-only school built in 1917. After white students integrated into black schools in 1969, Archer School closed and was demolished three years later.
Growing up in Archer, Lopez passed the school and gym everyday walking to and from the all-black school.
“I couldn’t go to [Archer School]. I used to pass it with my dad because he worked for the Maddox Foundry,” said Lopez. “I’d pass that school, and I said, ‘Dad, I want to go to school there.’ He said, ‘You can’t.’ He never gave me a reason why.”
But how the place once divided Archer became Lopez’s very reason for selecting the old gym as the Community Center.
For eight years, Lopez said she “worked like a dog” on the project alongside the Center committee, giving $19,000 of her own money as they encouraged others to give too.
The very first grant came from the state at $381,000. Departments like the USDA, Florida Historical Commission, Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources and Bureau of Historic Preservation all contributed over time.
“I chose to do it right in the Center of town to show that everybody would be welcome, not just whites, not just Blacks, but everybody,” Lopez said. “It was built for our community.”
After hearing the commission’s ideas about turning Archer Community Center into the City Hall or selling it, Lopez said her heart sank.
She criticized the city for neglecting the Center’s maintenance and said it hadn’t properly reported the facility’s condition to the USDA as required. She questioned staff’s estimated prices for renovating City Hall, which she said the community could rally together to do at discounted or free rates.
Hope did not respond for comment about the city’s role in preserving the Community Center or what it will do with the City Hall.
After her death, Lopez’s family told Mainstreet they intended to continue moving all her projects forward, like preserving Archer Community Center.
