Newcastle lord mayor Nuatali Nelmes has dismissed the idea that her new top-floor office is "attached to one person" as a "falsehood" motivated by political spin.
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Cr Nelmes and City of Newcastle chief executive officer Jeremy Bath will move into the sixth floor of the council's new Stewart Avenue building in May.
Mr Bath asked the building's developer to add the sixth floor before signing a lease for the building in late 2017. The lease will cost at least $35 million over 15 years.
Cr John Church, a member of the Newcastle Independents alliance and a persistent critic of the council move, again took aim at the "penthouse executive suite" at Tuesday night's council meeting.
He said the top-floor offices were a "symbol of council waste and self-indulgence" at a time when the city had more pressing needs.
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But Cr Nelmes responded that she "won't be here forever, thank god".
"So when people take pot shots at me personally about an office that I don't even have, considering I've been personally in a temporary mobile office for several years because of the construction in this [City Hall] building and a myriad of other factors, I'm now in a shared office with several staff members and no windows," she said.
"So the idea and the nuances and the absolute spin and political diatribe that somehow that a lord mayor of the city of Newcastle has to have, I don't know what, but just not an office, and somehow it's attached to the single person, is another complete falsehood.
"Because, guess what: I would say to other councillors who may be on council many more terms or might even be the lord mayor of the future of the city, are they all of a sudden just battening up the hatches and not having an office?"
The exchange came during a debate about how to manage City Hall's "civic spaces", the meeting chamber, councillor room and lord mayor's office and reception area, after the council moves out in May.
The council had planned to be entirely established in Stewart Avenue by February 1, but councillors will not start meeting in their new roll-in, roll-out chamber until June, after work on a $2.8 million ground-floor digital library is completed.
The delay in the top-floor work follows a council decision in December to add a $1.8 million emergency operations centre to the design.
Most of the council's office staff moved into the building in October while work continued on the ground and top floors.
Mr Bath told the Newcastle Herald that "upwards of 30 staff" not working directly for him or Cr Nelmes would also be based on the top floor.
The council voted in 2018 to move out of the City Hall meeting chamber, but Mr Bath said the old chamber would be used for the ceremonial first meeting of newly elected councils at the start of each term.
The council resolved on Tuesday to put City Hall's four civic spaces up for commercial hire from July 1 rather than retaining them purely for civic purposes.
The council committed to retain the spaces' "presentation" and "heritage value".