Amenia finally settles into new Town Hall

AMENIA — Once a schoolhouse and now the town’s municipal hub, the new Amenia Town Hall is up and running in the historic building that was once the Amenia Elementary School for the Webutuck Central School District.

The end of last week was a whirlwind of packing, moving, unpacking and settling in for town employees. Various work crews, ranging from carpet installers to painters to electricians and phone companies were in and out of the building all day Thursday and Friday, trying to prepare Town Hall to officially open Monday morning, Nov. 1.

A long history

with the firehouse

Amenia’s Town Hall had for decades been located within the Amenia Fire Company’s firehouse on Mechanic Street. And even before the firehouse came into play, current town Supervisor Wayne Euvrard reported that it has been discovered through research into old Town Board minutes that meetings weren’t always as official as they are today.

“They used to meet in gentlemen’s homes,� he said. “It’s a little different now.�

Several of the town’s authorities were unsure exactly when the firehouse first played its role in official town business, but long-time town residents Charlotte Murphy and Phil Thompson both confirmed that the town clerk’s office was part of the building even before the original firehouse burned to the ground, which was nearly three-quarters of a century ago in 1941.

Back then the town clerk’s office was in the front of the building, where the two vehicle bay doors are now. Murphy’s husband was elected town justice in 1957, and she said she remembers that big trials and board meetings were held on the second floor.

In 1972 a large donation from a private resident played a major part in the construction of an expansion to the firehouse. That expansion has served as Town Hall up until the recent move.

Although the firehouse has served the town well for many, many years, the members of the Town Board interviewed pointed out that a large part of the motivation to find a bigger, more permanent location had to do with space issues. It became a tight squeeze for the town to continue renting space from the Amenia Fire Company. Some town records even had to be stored off site.

From school to

Town Hall,

a lengthy move

Moving Town Hall was a process that began in theory more than a decade ago, Euvrard said,  when talks of centralizing the Webutuck campus around the high school on Haight Road first started picking up steam.

“This has been my dream,� Euvrard said. “To see it happen is pretty fantastic.�

As Euvrard and Councilwoman Darlene Riemer pointed out, the idea of using the elementary school building as a permanent Town Hall had even been recorded in the town’s comprehensive plan.

As tight economic situations began to put pressure on Webutuck, the school board decided that it would finally close up Amenia Elementary, cutting costs while also moving toward its own goal of campus centralization. District taxpayers gave permission to the school to offer the building to the town for the price of $1, at the school’s annual budget vote in 2009.

Euvrard was a staunch, early supporter of the move, saying the building would both give the town much-needed space as well as provide a sense of municipal pride for Amenia.

“The fire company has been a fantastic landlord for years,� he said. “But the town is certainly going to grow, and Town Hall is something we should be proud of.�

“We need to be self-sufficient,� Riemer said, echoing Euvrard’s sentiments. “And this is quite a building. It’s something we’ve always talked about, a dream come true.�

In the time between the district taxpayers’ approval of the sale of the building and now, there have been more than a few hurdles standing in the way of the town simply packing up its things and moving. Legal paperwork, notably an Environmental Assessment Form as well as the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) process, stretched out the timeline far longer than the supervisor originally anticipated.

“Think about moving out of your house,� Euvrard explained. “Then multiply it by 10. There’s 25,000 square feet here. As a renter, we never had to worry too much about maintenance or many of the things that we’ll now have to deal with. There’s not a guidebook on how to move a Town Hall.�

Costs covered

by special fund

It is expected that the costs of operating Town Hall will certainly increase, given that it is an historic and obviously aging building. And the heating costs will reflect the size of the large building. An energy audit authorized by the Town Board last year segued into a nearly $80,000 grant for energy-efficiency improvements from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), but most of that work will not be addressed until well after the new Town Hall is up and running.

All of the expenses for the move are being covered by earmarked funds that were donated to the town from the sale of the Tri-Wall Container Corporation building in Wassaic. Those funds were specifically designated for use in finding Amenia a new, permanent Town Hall and totaled approximately $300,000.

As the possibility of moving grew closer, Riemer, who is an architect by profession, compiled a scope of work for the move. It was originally a lengthy list of 20 items. It was then decided that it would be more efficient to separate the list into phases, with only the bare essentials included in Phase One, the only phase to be completed before the move.

Matt Deister and Alternative Designs, a company based in Somers, N.Y., were hired  at the beginning of October as general contractors for Phase One work, which was labelled by board resolution as “emergency workâ€� to avoid a lengthy competitive bidding process. The fire company, as the landlord, had asked the town to be out of the building by Oct. 1; it later extended that date to Oct. 29 at Euvrard’s request.

Work in Phase One included painting and cleaning, the construction of a fireproof vault for town records, electrical work and phone and Internet installation. One hundred thousand dollars  was taken out of the Tri-Wall fund, leaving (after accumulated interest) approximately $215,000 in reserve. It was, and still is to some degree, unclear exactly how much Phase One will end up costing. Riemer was confident on Oct. 28 that the phase will come in under $100,000, while Euvrard suspected that the actual cost might be more like $120,000.

Phases Two and Three mainly involve work to the gymnasium and the auditorium in the building. Those rooms are not currently in use, and as Mike Segelken, the town’s building inspector, explained, a partial Certificate of Occupancy (CO) was issued excluding parts of the building, including those two areas, as well as the service elevator, which needs to be inspected.

A temporary Certificate of Occupancy was issued at the last minute earlier this week, according to Segelken, who explained that the fire alarm system didn’t meet the zoning code requirements for public assembly and that additional sprinkler heads needed to be installed. The installation company did work on Saturday but as of Tuesday morning had yet to finish, Segelken said, hence the temporary certificate issued.

Settling in to a new,

permanent, home

Town Board meetings will now be held in one of the classrooms on the southern side of the building. Town videographer Gary Bonds set up broadcasting equipment in the room last week. While the broadcast will remain analog for the time being, a stipend from Cablevision will help Bonds convert to a digital signal in the near future.

And in the midst of movers carting boxes and furniture around, town employees were settling in to their new, spacious offices, optimistic about the future of Town Hall.

“It’s very exciting,� said Dawn Marie Klingner, who is both court clerk and one of the administrative assistants to the supervisor. “The court is very eager to open its doors, and I think having new facilities will help us work even more efficiently.�

“This building will get a lot of use,� Riemer said confidently. “It’s a place we can all be proud of.�

Because Veterans Day is next Thursday, Nov. 11, which would have been the first scheduled Town Board meeting of the month, the first Town Board meeting in the new building will be held Wednesday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m.

Originally a ribbon-cutting ceremony was to be held before that meeting. But Euvrard said that date was going to be too rushed and that the official celebration of the new Town Hall would be postponed to coincide with the town’s reorganization meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 5.