Some commutes have gotten longer, some shorter.
Some work in open, modern high-tech offices, others in Dilbert cubicles, often still surrounded by unpacked cardboard boxes and empty filing cabinets.
Some can walk out the door and find half a dozen places for lunch. Others have to brown bag it or hop in the car if they want to eat lunch.
Welcome to the mixed bag facing some 1,500 state employees left without an office after tropical storm Irene flooded the Waterbury state office complex Aug. 28.
For top administration officials, Irene has meant a Rubik’s cube-like puzzle of workspace rejiggering: first scouring for empty rentable spaces around the central Vermont and Burlington region, then trying to figure out who fits where and how to keep departments together as much as possible.
Whether it’s at the chief or worker bee level, it’s been one heck of a ride. And in some cases, that’s been literally true.
“I’ve had a small office… known as a 2010 Toyota Tacoma,” said Forests. Parks and Recreation Commissioner Michael Snyder, pausing for a bit of comic timing as he describes where he’s been working the past three months.
For David Mears, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, the past three months has meant “kind of bouncing from cubicle to cubicle,” at National Life in Montpelier and other offices as he borrowed any space with WiFi where he could work.
Mears had resisted a cell phone before the flood but got an iPhone from the state after Irene hit. He jokes he went “from zero to 70 miles per hour” in the communication world.
“After the flood, it became my lifeline,” said Mears, a Fulbright scholar who was a professor at Vermont Law School before taking the DEC post.
Both Mears and Snyder, a longtime forester who lives in Stowe, have finally landed a real office in Waitsfield, an empty space in a modern three-story building built to house offices for alternative energy company Northern Power Systems. It’s located on a dirt road winding around an office complex just off Route 100 on the Airport Road. They moved in along with other top Agency of Natural Resource staffers on Monday, Nov. 21, ending 12 weeks of life as office outcasts.
For Snyder, it was a welcome end to trying to run a department of 110 full-time employees and a wide array of landholdings that includes 52 state parks, from either his dining room, the seat of his truck or any state office space he could temporarily find, accompanied by a laptop, cell phone and files.
“It’s been a challenge,” he said. Snyder has high praise for the “cooperative spirit” of other state agencies who let him and his staff crowd in and use their facilities. “That’s not easy — they had a lot of things going on,” he said.
What happened to his department and the Agency of Natural Resources, which along with the Agency of Human Resources and Public Safety were the arms of state government most affected by Irene, captures the chaos and gradual resettlement of a big chunk of state government.
Snyder’s office now is a modest conference room with a table and a desk with a computer on it, shelves still largely empty. Along with other departments such as Fish and Wildlife and Environmental Conservation, Irene delivered a double whammy, displacing staff at the same time it slammed workers with an immense task in dealing damage to Vermont’s rivers, fisheries, state parks and landholdings.
“You know, we’re making the best of it, but there are unintended consequences,” he said, citing how something as simple as clarifying contract wording meant a dozen emails back and forth instead of walking to a staffer’s office and talking it out in five minutes.
“We haven’t been able to do that in months,” he said.
He’s hoping finally having top ANR administration in one office in Fayston will lower the stress and work levels for employees. “I think we’re doing a pretty good job, “I’m proud of our people. We’re rallying,” he said.
Still, displaced Waterbury workers are now located in 16 different office spaces around central and northern Vermont and hanging over their heads is considerable uncertainty about when — and if — the Waterbury complex will be reopened for work. The state has said it will be six to 12 months at least before that decision is made.
The luck of the draw, both good and bad, is illustrated in what happened to Steve Bushman and Ginger Anderson, a couple from Berlin who both work for ANR.
Anderson, who works for Forests and Parks, saw her daily commute stay about the same with the new office in Waitsfield. Bushman, who works in the dam program for Department of Environmental Conservation, has seen his commute grow considerably to his new office in Winooski at the Vermont Student Assistance Corp., where DEC employees water programs are being housed.
“Because I take the bus, it’s added about two hours a day for me for my commute,” he said. It’s also inconvenient because most of the dams in the state are located in central and southern parts of the state, he said.
A state employee for 20 years, the upheaval has been a hard adjustment. But he has only praise for the way the state handled the difficult process.
“It’s a pretty commendable job they did. They found homes for everybody,” he said.
Still, many employees also feel they lost a home when their offices in Waterbury got swamped. Cathy Merrill, the executive assistant for Fish & Wildlife Commissioner Patrick Berry, has spent 38 years in state government and 20 years as assistant to the commissioners. For her, the events of Aug. 28 when the Winooski River overflowed were wrenching.
“You get to see people every day and they become family and then overnight, it’s like everybody scattered to the winds, and you’re never going to see those people again,” she said.
Also weighing on her is what she calls the “luck of the draw” when it comes to her commute. As a resident of Colchester, her drive was never short but instead of 35 minutes it’s now over an hour to the new Waitsfield office. If she’d ended up in Winooski at the Vermont Student Assistance Corp. offices, she’d been minutes from her house. It could also have been worse if she had ended up in Graniteville where ANR solid waste department staffers landed.
She admits the upheaval, the longer drive and the switch out of the familiar “old funky building” in Waterbury with big windows to a six by six cubicle has got her thinking a bit about retirement. Still, she loves the people she works with and the issues she deals with (she likes to fish).
So what’s her current feeling?
“It changes every day,” she jokes.
ANR Secretary Deb Markowitz is well aware of all the impacts of the dislocation, from the commutes to the workspace changes and difficulties of having some 400 ANR staffers formerly at Waterbury split up into five different locations.
“We really look forward to being all back together in one place,” she said.
Markowitz said a survey of ANR found that roughly one-third of employees ended up with a longer commute, a third now go about the same distance and a third have a shorter drive.
Markowitz said one plus from the upheaval is discovering how efficiency and communications have improved among water quality employees who are now under one roof at VSAC in a modern, open office space, which she said has made a “tremendous difference.”
For DEC Commissioner Mears, however, having his department split up into offices at VSAC and Graniteville is not ideal. “I’m going to spend a large amount of time going to other offices,” he said.
He is also concerned about the larger picture, wondering whether the dislocation from Waterbury will cause the state to lose some valuable employees.
“There’s a number of ways people’s lives have been disrupted, from the large to the small,” he said, listing such issues as the cost of commuting, arranging day care, picking up kids from school, doctor’s visits and physical therapy appointments.
It also weighs on workers to not know when or if they might move back to Waterbury.
“A lot of people have worked for decades in Waterbury and settled into their routines,” he said. “The uncertainty is almost worse.”
Correction: We originally reported that the new temporary ANR offices were located in Fayston. The location is Waitsfield.
