The current Warren town garage is a two-or-three-acre site, bounded by wetlands, the road to the elementary school and a stream. It features a 56-year-old main building that was used when re-erected on the site in 1969.
As Warren works its way toward a bond vote on a new town garage this November, Warren Select Board chair Devin Klein Corrigan and her son Rhys as well as town road foreman Andrew Bombard provided a tour of the existing facility this week.
A sandpile with the remnants of last winter’s sand is on site as well as a salt pile. The concrete blocks holding the sand in place bow outward. There are several cargo containers on site and a 15-year-old construction trailer (also purchased used) that has seen some significant wear and tear over the years serving as an office, assessable by three steep steps with short treads and tall risers.
Every container and building and shed is full, full of enormous tires, chains for tires, road signs, sawhorses and more. The older garage structure has three bays and walls covered in meticulously organized tools, supplies and equipment. As with many local town garages, space is an issue. Beyond the huge truck bodies that hold plows and transport salt and sand and fill, there are loaders, excavators, mowers and more. The doors to the bays show scrapes and dings from plows that barely fit in them. Whether it’s summer or winter, there’s a lot jockeying that must be done to service the equipment, moving things in and out of the two garage buildings and that eats up a lot of time that could be spent working on roads.
Heat for the two garage buildings comes from overhead blowers and the ceiling in the oldest building is insulation covered in exhaust. Heat in the office building seems to be electric.
Bombard said that when he joined the town road crew 15 years ago, the office trailer was purchased because it wasn’t appropriate for town staff to eat lunch and take breaks in the garage with diesel exhaust.
The roof of the oldest and largest garage leaks and was awash in standing water during last weekend’s heavy rains, snow melts through too. It’s easy, standing on the site to see why the town is seeking to build a new town garage. There are electrical issues, ventilation issues, worker safety issues at this site.
The town’s plans for a new town garage are currently before estimators at ReArch and a price is expected in the coming weeks, Klein Corrigan said. The plan is to build the new structure on town-owned land off Vaughn Brown Road. Vaughn Brown Road is just south of West Hill Road on the west side of Route 100. It is kitty-corner to the intersection of Route 100 and Main Street.
Current plans call for a 12,000-square-foot building. While the price of the project is still being determined, earlier versions of the project came in at $12-$15 million and Klein Corrigan said the project had been pared down and that the select board was hopeful it would come in at or under $10 million.
Some changes in the current iteration of the building being priced by ReArch include separating decommissioning of the current site from the project, eliminating plans to build a new portion of Vaughn Brown Road and if the bond passes, the town plans to do some of the site work rather than hire it out.
“We all felt like the estimating company had been very conservative which in the estimating world means the earlier estimates were more expensive than the final costs. We’re looking forward to seeing what actual costs might look like,” she said.
Assuming a positive bond vote, the project will go out for bid next winter and town road crews will do what site work they can in-between plowing, and other regular road tasks.
