Granby STM set
GRANBY – Voters will determine whether to fund a renovation project for the former West Street School to be used as municipal offices and the senior center at a Dec. 11 Special Town Meeting at the East Meadow School at 7 p.m.
The project is estimated to cost about $5 million, including design fees, which will give the town a building free of hazardous materials, capable of housing all existing municipal offices and storage for the town. The building closed in 2018, when students moved to the new wing of the East Meadow School.
Currently, the town is leasing a building to house municipal offices in the Town Hall Annex. The town currently owns the building used for other offices and the senior center. The planwould be to sell the building.
Granby Town Administrator Chris Martin spoke about the repairs that would be involved in the project at a Nov. 9 Finance Committee meeting. Martin said the project makes sense financially.
“We have to maintain four buildings,” he said. These are West State Street, the Town Hall Annex, the old Carnegie Building, and the West Street building. “By consolidating all the offices into one building we are eliminating the care and maintenance of three facilities.”
Currently the town leases the Town Hall Annex for about $26,000 a year. He said the town also heats the West Street building to make sure the pipes don’t freeze, as the building is being used for some storage purposes.
Martin discussed the scope of the project.
“We need to address the current condition of the building to make it so it’s habitable for our municipal offices, senior center and maybe be able to do other things in the future,” he said. “We included a sprinkler fire protection system...windows and door replacement, HVAC, asbestos removal, PCB removal and updating the water system.”
Asbestos abatement will be done on sewer pipes and tiles on the floor. The estimated cost from two different firms was between $674,000 to $885,000.
“When we put the roof on at the [West Street building] in 2011/2012, when we had to shore up the roof in one area, they discovered the glue dobs and we had to have the tiles remediated before they could go in and put the additional bracing on the roof,” Martin said. “I’m running on the presumption we’ll have to do that again no matter what.”
All 44,000 square feet of the building will have brand new windows, which will cut down on the mildew problem on the building identified by a member of the Department of Public Health, Martin said. There are also designer fees and an OPM (owners project manager) fee because any project over $1.5 million requires an OPM.
Martin said the plan is to have a functioning kitchen in the building. There would be a plan to use the larger room hereferred to as the “cafetorium” for town meetings.
West Street Building Committee Chair Lynn Snopek-Mercier spoke to the board earlier this month about the committee’s recommendation.
“We’re here to ask you to schedule a special town meeting for early December to bring this project forward with approval and spending authority,” she said in a meeting earlier this month. “The funding for this will not require any increase in taxes as there are other available funds to pay for the project.”
Proposed funding for the project includes using American Rescue Plan Act funds, of which Granby has about $1.8 million. There was $3 million from the elementary school construction/renovation project that the Finance Committee appropriated $2 million from stabilization fund that could be reallocating to the West Street building project. The remaining funds are being discussed using money previously allocated for the East Meadow gym project reservation funds.
An information session about the project will be on Wednesday, Nov. 29, at the West State Street building at the Selectboard meeting.
