[W]ATERBURY — Kitted out with hard hats and gold shovels, town and state officials broke ground on a new municipal office complex in Waterbury on Monday.
The $5 million center, which will house the town’s municipal offices, library and historical society, is the latest in a series of construction projects in Waterbury, which are all part of the lengthy recovery from the impact of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.
Gov. Peter Shumlin was joined by Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., to celebrate the construction kickoff.
“When you think about the progress that has been made in Waterbury, it’s got to bring pride to every single Vermonter that the outcome could be as extraordinary as it is today,” Shumlin said.
Waterbury is at the midpoint of scheduled post-Irene recovery projects, according to municipal manager William Shepeluk. The town is scheduled to undertake several more infrastructure projects over the next several years, and will rebuild Main Street in 2018 and 2019. When all is said and done, Shepeluk said, the revamp schedule will be completed over “almost a full decade.”
Safety orange and construction crews will be a common sight in Waterbury this summer. In addition to the municipal offices project, construction is underway at the Waterbury State Office Complex as well as major transportation infrastructure projects on Vermont Route 100 and I-89.
The municipal office project will renovate and add an addition to the Dr. Henry Janes house on North Main Street, which has housed the town library for nearly a century.
“This commitment to not just tear it down and start over again, but to renew and rebuild bigger and better is a kind of statement of Vermont character,” Welch said.
The municipal center will be a significant check off the town’s to-do list, Shepeluk said. After the flood, as the town identified close to two-dozen projects, the municipal offices and the library became “the focal points,” he said.
In fact, efforts to redo the library have been going on for decades, Shepeluk said. But the project became a priority after Irene’s floodwaters inundated the previous municipal offices on South Main Street in August 2011.
The town offices took temporary refuge in Thatcher Brook Elementary School before moving to the second floor of the fire department building on South Main Street in November 2011.
The bill for the new center will be footed by a combination of town bond money, grants and local fundraising. Move-in day is scheduled for Jan. 20, 2016.
Waterbury voters approved a $2.95 million bond measure on Town Meeting Day 2014 for the Janes house project. The bond measure survived a rescission vote two months later.
About $1.25 million in several different grants from the Agency of Commerce and Community Development will help to fund the project, as will fundraising efforts from the town library and historical society.
Residents voted down a previous effort to approve a $5 million bond in June 2013 that would have funded a municipal center on the south side of town by the state’s Waterbury Office Complex.
Rep. Rebecca Ellis, D-Waterbury Center, who was a member of the selectboard when Irene struck, said there was a high level of community engagement in developing the plan for the town offices.
“People came to understand that by putting all of these functions together we could have economies of scale,” Ellis said.
Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, acknowledged that the project had drawn some criticism from locals.
“Once the changes happen, I think people will be happy to see it, but a lot of people had their issues,” Stevens said.
The cost of the project was one issue, he said. With the current location of the project, some people are disappointed that the site will impact community garden lots, but Stevens said that the gardens will be moved.
Patricia Moulton, the secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said she is optimistic about the Waterbury town offices project.
After Irene, FEMA warned state officials to expect recovery to take between three and five years, she said, putting Waterbury’s municipal center project on target.
“As horrible as it was here in Waterbury, it will be so much better on the other side, I think,” Moulton said.
