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The signs in Farmington's new town hall are still made of paper, and the committee chair thinks they will be into the new year.
The building is the 1928 wing of the old Farmington High School, renovated for $16 million and occupied by town staff since February. It stands on the same campus as the school. The paper went up because the permanent signage is not there yet: printed and handwritten labels around the building, including at the buzzers that unlock each department's door.
It turned out to be useful. At the Ad Hoc 1928 Building Committee's August 25 meeting, the project team said it had gone back through the paper that had accumulated in the building and used it to settle what the permanent package needs to cover. The improvised signs were, in effect, a list of what the building could not explain about itself. Town Manager Kathleen Blonski wanted them gone. "We're getting the paper off the walls," she said.
They are not gone yet. As of August 25 the permanent signage did not have a price, and Peter Mastrobattista, who chairs the committee, put the likely finish somewhere in the new year.
The town has been saying signs are next since May
In May, Blonski told the committee she expected the money in the capital budget opening July 1 to go to signage first, ahead of the town's plan for furniture replacement. In June, with construction essentially finished, the committee laid out the package it wanted: a directory on each floor, projecting signs at office doorways, and something on the outside of the building to tell a first-time visitor which door is the front one.
The vendor is SignPro, which did the interior signage design package for this building and for some of the high school. The new work runs outside and in. A main entrance sign goes above the front stonework, so a first-time visitor aims at the right door. Projecting flag signs go above the entry doors of the main office spaces, so a department can be read from down the corridor instead of only head-on. Each floor gets a copy of the lobby directory, hung at the end of the hall for people who are already inside and still do not know where they are going. The door buzzers get permanent notices instead of paper. And the exterior wayfinding will match what is already up at the high school, so the whole campus, the town hall annex and the pavilion included, reads as one place.
Shop drawings are close to done. The artwork is roughly 80 percent complete. Pricing was expected within a week or two of the meeting. After that, the estimate given to the committee was that fabrication and installation would take about two months.
Mastrobattista's reply was shorter. "Probably first of the year."
Whose money it is
None of that is the building committee's decision to make. Asked whether a new signage package was the committee's business at all, Blonski was direct. "It's not part of this purview," she said. "We're paying for it at a capital expense." Assistant Town Manager Kat Krajewski added that the new signs are modeled on what already exists in the building, so the finished campus should not read as two different jobs stitched together.
The $16 million renovation has its own budget, and that budget is nearly closed. The signs come from town capital, a separate account with its own queue and its own timing. The money opened on July 1, as Blonski said it would. Eight weeks later the signs still had no quote.
Nobody at the meeting treated that as a failure, and there is no obvious reason they should have. In the meantime the town is improvising in two places at once. Farmington's highway department has had interim parking and entrance arrows up on the approach road since at least June. The building has paper on its walls. Both stand in for the same missing package.
Two invoices and a conversation about dinner
The recording of the August 25 meeting runs under ten minutes. The chair's report, in full: "I guess building is done and we're just paying up a few bills." Asked how clean things were with KBE Building Corporation, the general contractor, the committee heard that the team is "chasing a few minor items."
Two invoices were read in and approved together on a voice vote with no opposition: $17,229.42 to Interscape for furniture, and $32,586.08 to J. Iapaluccio, Inc., the project's civil and site contractor, for site work.
Krajewski reported that the budget summary now shows Iapaluccio at 98 percent, which she believed releases the rest of the retainage on that contract. Retainage is the slice of a contractor's payment a town holds back until the work is finished and accepted, and on this project it is most of what is left to pay.
The furniture charge comes out of owner's contingency, the cushion set aside for whatever a construction project turns up that nobody planned for. Krajewski put that at just over $84,000 remaining, roughly where it stood when the committee last met in July, and said nothing else had moved.
"Party time," one member said, and the conversation turned briefly to a committee dinner. It came back around at the end of the meeting, when a member asked that a year-end gathering be scheduled before a December 17 departure for Florida. Mastrobattista said a date would come at the next meeting.
There may not be many meetings left to set it in. Asked how much longer the committee has, Krajewski said one or two more should be enough, pending the last few items with KBE. The committee then voted to cancel its September 8 meeting and keep September 22.
In the spring this body was still buying equipment. It approved $17,700 to cool a server room that was running at 84 degrees, weeks after the ribbon cutting had declared the building open. Now it is down to two invoices and a discussion about dinner.
Farmington is about to do all of this again on a larger scale. The town has seated another building committee for a $30 million to $35 million fire station overhaul headed for a 2027 referendum.
That is what the end of a $16 million public building project looks like. Staff moved in during February. The ribbon was cut in May. The contractors are down to retainage, the committee is counting its remaining meetings, and the signs that would tell a resident where to go still do not have a price.
The committee meets again on September 22. The paper is still on the walls.
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's building committees long enough to know that a project is never finished when the construction ends. He is on his second coffee and has read every line of a ten-minute meeting. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the ten-minute committee meeting that still contained news, the capital account that decides whether you can find the front door, the invoice nobody would ever see unless someone typed it up. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Always last to breaking news, thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰