Warren’s town garage site is a collection of tidy and well-organized work spaces housed in decrepit, falling-down, environmentally-unfriendly and worker-unsafe buildings. Water comes in through electrical outlets and from the roof, just FYI.
The town has done the best it could with the site from 1969 until now, but it’s really time. It’s really time that the town’s road crew has a safe place to work and one that is large enough to handle the town’s equipment without having to constantly move unwieldly equipment in and out through doors designed for smaller equipment. That wastes time and it burns diesel and uses up engines and tires.
It's not just Warren though. In 2018 and 2019 Fayston began looking at building a new, worker-friendly, and environmentally up-to-date town garage. Here is an excerpt from a Valley Reporter story about the Fayston town garage that was published in December 2019.
“Muscle through the man-door on the left side of the garage entrance and one is met with a wall of double-axle and single-axle plow trucks and plows with their plows angled toward each other like square dancers. There’s barely room to squeeze alongside the plows to access the tools, tool benches and supplies and there’s no way to squeeze between the square-dancing plow blades without climbing over them or surfing through the curl of the blade itself.”
It's like that in Warren, Waitsfield, and Fayston. These buildings are old, undersized, and no longer meet basic safety and/or environmental codes. They were built decades ago and do not reflect the reality of town road work in 2025 where local road crews were still fixing damage from a May 17 storm when an all-day deluge on May 31 did more damage.
Fayston’s plans got waylaid by the COVID-19 pandemic and Waitsfield’s went out to bid, stalling along the way. Warren’s working on it. We owe it to our public works staffs to provide safe working facilities that reflect the reality of the jobs we’re asking them to do. We owe it to ourselves, as the climate changes and our roads pay the price, to make sure those facilities are safe for workers and as safe as possible for the planet.
