AUBURN – Architects unveiled a shiny new plan for the Great Falls School complex Thursday, complete with a new glass-enclosed entrance, a lobby and a price tag of $7 million to $10 million.

They also suggested a start date for construction: 2013

“We’re not here with an easy-bullet fix,” Boston architect Carol Burns told the roughly 200 people who attended the meeting.

The money would take years to raise and lots of sticky issues – including the creation of an umbrella organization to run the city-owned building – would need to be fast-tracked, Burns said.

However, if people wanted it enough, the nearly 6-acre complex could literally be a showpiece, she said.

“There’s room for a lot of the arts,” she said.

The longtime home of the Community Little Theater and Edward Little High School’s Drama Club has been targeted for years as an arts center, going back to the city’s 1995 comprehensive plan and the ADAPT plan for downtown development finished four years later.

“It’s the one missing piece that hasn’t been completed,” said Laurie Smith, Auburn’s assistant city manager.

This spring, the city and the theater company began to change that, hiring Burns’ firm, Taylor & Burns Architects, to examine the property along with Anita Lauricella of Lauricella Associates of Boston.

The pair’s report was not finished, but the preliminary results were outlined Thursday.

Together, they found that the building could be transformed. Though it’s old and in ill repair, it is structurally sound. In fact, Burns found that replacing the building would cost millions more than renovating it.

But making the changes immediately would be “very risky,” Lauricella said.

The city’s informal operation of the building led the complex into the red, costing more to maintain than it earns in rent, she said.

An umbrella group could turn it around, Burns said. Modest improvements to the building, beginning with the removal of the signs that still call it a school and a new marketing scheme, could bring in more tenants.

The City Council could begin the work of creating the management organization in the coming weeks, Smith said.

Part of the goal of Thursday’s meeting was to gauge support for moving forward. Attendees were encouraged to write ideas onto sticky notes and post them on easels set up below the stage.

Attendees seemed to favor the concept but brought lots of questions.

Dick Rosenberg, a longtime actor and director with the theater, worried that his group’s investment in costly equipment might be unprotected if the theater space is widely shared, as outlined by Burns.

Leaders of Community Little Theater have examined moving out of the space in previous years but were faced with big bills.

Rosenberg had no simple answers for how the theater might be funded any other way.

“The building is so big and costs so much,” he said.

The 53,000-square-foot complex is being used by several other groups, including a dance school and a yoga instructor.

Any new use would be aimed at such a mix of tenants, said Steve Huber, the theater company’s president.

“It needs to be a community center for all of us,” he said.