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The $16 million job of turning the 1928 wing of the old Farmington High School into the town's new town hall is, for all practical purposes, finished. Staff moved in back in February. The ribbon was cut in May. The exterior stone went up between meetings and, by the committee's own assessment, came out looking good.
What's left is smaller and more human: nobody can tell where the front door is.
That was the recurring thread when the Ad Hoc 1928 Building Committee met June 23. With the construction essentially complete, the committee has arrived at the unglamorous last leg of any big public project, the part where you stop building the thing and start explaining it to the people who are supposed to use it. In this case, that means signs. A lot of signs.
The need is real. Approach the building from the wrong side and there is little to tell you it is the town hall at all. Inside, members said, it is hard to tell from down the hall where things are. The fix the committee described is a wayfinding package built in layers: a directory of what is on each floor, posted where you come off the elevator; projecting signs at the corners of doorways so you can read "tax" or any other office while looking down the hall rather than only head-on; and, outside, a clear marker for the main entrance, "right up on the top," next to the column, so a first-time visitor aims at the correct door.
Parking is its own puzzle, and summer makes it worse. With school out, the committee noted, people see an empty lot and a park and assume they can pull in, when in fact they cannot get to the right spot that way. Farmington's highway department has already installed interim signs, the town-hall-parking-and-arrow variety, to point drivers where they need to go. A more permanent solution for that corner is still being worked out.
Here is the part worth underlining for taxpayers: the signage is not coming out of the building project. It will be paid from the Town Hall Capital account, money that becomes available July 1. The project budget itself is nearly closed.
On that front, the committee approved three change orders as part of its invoice package, all of them small and all of them about doors. The first, for $8,144.40, lets the front doors hold open during business hours and lock automatically after, a security measure for the hours when people are using the gym. The second, $9,999.23, added card-swipe access control to a stairwell exit so it can double as an employee entrance. The third, $2,834.70, added access control to a side door near the generator so the whole system syncs together. The committee approved the invoice package on a voice vote, with no opposition.
The money picture is tight but orderly. The committee reported just under $90,000 left in contingency, with something over $15,000 in forecasted change orders still being negotiated, several of which, the finance side noted, started much higher and have been knocked down in price. Most of the project's accounts now sit at 96 percent or more of being used, much of that the retainage held back from the contractor and the commissioning agent, whose final report is still owed. Contingency is 85 percent expended. The authorized-change figure stands at roughly $542,427.
What happens to whatever is left over is a question the committee raised and did not resolve. It depends, members said, on how much of the project the town actually bonded. If the full amount was not bonded, the unspent piece simply is not borrowed; if it was, the surplus goes to the town's surplus account. The honest answer in the room was that they would have to check. The Mercury will not guess at it either.
The committee also let its gaze drift, briefly, past the building itself. The back of the library, one member observed, does not present well from up on the campus, and there was early talk of tree screening, of contracting out grounds maintenance, of treating the whole municipal-and-school campus as something to keep up rather than a collection of separate parcels. None of that is a decision. It is the sound a committee makes when the project it was formed to finish is nearly finished and the members start looking at what comes next.
The committee canceled its July 14 meeting and will next convene July 28. For more on how the project reached this final stretch, see last month's $17,700 fix for a server room that was running at 84 degrees and the May ribbon cutting that marked the building's official opening.
The warmest item on the agenda was not on the agenda at all. The custodial staff, one member said, has the place looking brand new, four or five visits in and not a scrap of litter anywhere, and he asked that the compliment be passed along. Someone else volunteered that the window washer deserved equal credit, that walking into a gym wrapped in clean glass makes an impression. It does. A building people are proud to keep clean is a building that worked.
The Farmington Mercury is always last to breaking news. By the time we get to a story, the dust has settled and you can see the whole road. In this case, the road finally has signs. We're not first. We're thorough.