ST. JOHNSBURY — The town has won a half-million-dollar grant to clean up its long-blighted armory, a significant step in plans to move public safety services into the old building.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced the $500,000 award Tuesday. St. Johnsbury is one of only two recipients from Vermont this grant cycle — the other being a Northeast Kingdom coalition focused on brownfields.
“We’re one giant step closer to having a real, bona fide project at a property we’ve been trying for 12 or 13 years to find a solution (for),” Assistant Town Manager Joe Kasprzak said Friday.
With the EPA money in hand, town officials are now waiting to hear about another $500,000 grant from the state Vermont Community Development Program. Town representatives are scheduled to meet with state officials about the grant in June.
If all goes as planned, Kasprzak said, the town will ask residents in late summer or early fall to approve a $4 million to $5 million bond for the entire armory project.
“We couldn’t even give it away, basically,” he said. The building had been available for years for $1 to any interested developer.
The two-story armory building on Main Street was built in 1916 and operated for decades under the state Board of Armory Commissioners, which oversees properties for the Vermont National Guard. In 1975, the board sold the building to the town government and several local departments moved in.
However, town officials closed the armory in 2009 because it was too costly to keep it in line with evolving safety codes, according to the grant application, and has remained vacant since.
In recent years, town officials have taken fresh looks at possible uses for the downtown building, but contaminants — particularly PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, used in paint in the basement — blocked those plans.
The floor paint in the armory basement tested for PCB concentrations of up to 5,700 parts per million, according to grant documents. Officials plan to dispose of the wastes through a facility in Michigan. Safe PCB levels in buildings depend on the size of the human being and the length of exposure, and there’s no bright line on safe exposure. However, government safety guidelines indicate that materials containing PCBs in concentrations of 50 parts per million or more are regulated.
Developers didn’t want to touch the armory project because of the contamination, Kasprzak said, and officials received remediation cost estimates between $800,000 and $1.3 million.
“That was just an obstacle too large,” he said.
But if the town could get grants to lower the net remediation costs, officials believed residents would back a bond to finance the whole project.
So last fall, officials applied for the EPA grant. Securing the funds, the assistant town manager said, is a crucial step toward persuading residents to approve the financing.
The town wants to move its police department and regional dispatch center into the armory. They’re now in a building down the street that isn’t structurally sound, Kasprzak said. The town fire department, which uses the same building, has had to store some equipment elsewhere because it is too heavy for the building to handle without risk.
Finding a use for the armory has also been a priority because of its historic value and prominent spot on the town’s main drag.
“The last thing we wanted to do was go build a new structure and leave that building vacant and blighted,” Kasprzak said.
If voters approve the financing, remediation would occur next spring and summer with construction starting later that year. Officials hope to have the armory occupied in early summer of 2023.
“It’s really important for communities like ours that have brownfields right in the middle of their downtowns, that they can seek assistance,” Kasprzak said.
