Online update to Warren town garage story
The estimated cost of the new Warren town garage did not come in at $500-$600 per square foot. It came in at over $800 per square foot. The garage task force committee is hoping the designers can get the price per square foot down to $500-$600 per square foot. That means that the $6.6 million price reported in this week’s issue was incorrect. The actual estimated price, per task force and select board Devin Klein Corrigan is over $13 million. Part of both the $6.6 million estimate and the $13-plus million price is a new road to the site.
The Warren Select Board and the town garage task force will discuss the estimates for the new town garage at a public hearing on January 28 at the town office at 6:30 p.m.
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Next week the Warren Select Board will hear recommendations from the town’s town garage task force at a public hearing on January 28.
The meeting gets underway at 6:30 p.m. at the town office. This week the task force received preliminary cost estimates for the structure, currently planned for 12,000 square feet. The estimates came in at $500-$600 per square foot which would make the cost of the garage $6 to $7 million, which is well above what the task force had planned, according to task force and select board member Devin Klein Corrigan.
“That is obviously higher than what we’d like and we have the consultants directions to give us some other options,” Klein Corrigan said.
Warren is in the process of planning for a new town garage on 78 acres off Vaughn Brown Road. The town’s current garage is on a three-acre parcel on School Road in the village.
Since last year, the town’s task force has been working on plans for the new piece of infrastructure, including hiring a Weimann Lanphere designers and VHB engineers to assist with the process. Part of the process has involved public input on siting, location, and access. To that end, the town had contemplated changing the existing access to the site from Vaughn Brown Road (off Route 100) to a separate access aligned more northerly than the existing road and access to a town fire pond. A separate, new road will cost an estimated $3.5 million, Klein Corrigan said.
“There were concerns that the existing road is too steep for the town trucks and that there may be noise issues. We’ve asked the designers and engineers to revisit that and take a look at what kind of noise mitigation could be added,” she noted.
The task force will make a recommendation to the select board about the scale and scope of the project and the select board will decide whether to bring a bond vote on the project to voters at Town Meeting this March.
“If we do vote this year there are two options. We could begin work this fall and work through the winter, with completion next summer. Or we could start next spring and work through the summer, saving ourselves the cost of working through the winter but incurring any cost increases from waiting a year,” Klein Corrigan explained.
She pointed out that the cost estimates include all the site work at the new property as well as all clean up and potential mitigation at the current site.
“We’ll be bringing the current site back to raw land and while we haven’t discussed the future of that site, it could be used for housing,” she said.
