Town officials say they plan to move the New Canaan Health Department temporarily out of the agency’s Vine Cottage home this spring or summer in order to spruce up the prominent Main Street building.
The exterior repairs to the turreted, yellow structure will take about three weeks, according to Bill Oestmann, superintendent of buildings with the Department of Public Works.
“There’s some wood rot over there and some water damage on the outside of the building, which we all can see,” Oestmann told members of the Board of Selectmen during their April 19 meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference.
Asked about the status of the Health Department, he said, “I’m going to move them out. I’m going to them up to Irwin for probably about three weeks, weather-permitting. For a couple of reasons. One is there is lead and stuff we have to deal with. We have to shut down the air-conditioning system. And we have young people over there, we don’t want no problems if they decide to have children or whatever with the lead and all that stuff. So we just said, ‘Get them out.’ We’re going to move what they need to operate up there [at Irwin]. We’re not going to take the whole building out. If they need to get in there to get paper work or whatever, we can do that certainly. But the safe thing is just let’s get them out of the way and let our guys not worry.”
The comments came as Oestmann requested funds for two separate contracts to paint the exterior of Vine Cottage and perform repairs there.
Selectmen Kathleen Corbet and Nick Williams voted 2-0 in favor of a $37,400 contract with Aladdin Services, LLC for the painting and up to $20,000 with A.W. Construction for the repairs. First Selectman Kevin Moynihan was absent.
The two companies will work in tandem, with Aladdin stripping the paint off of the building to expose problems for A.W. to address prior to repainting it (in the same original color), Oestmann said. If more than $20,000 is needed for the repair work, DPW will come back for more funds, he said.
“The reason we are doing it that way is because there are some unknowns there,” he said. “I don’t want to call it a ‘can of worms,’ but you never know.”
It isn’t clear yet just when the project will start, Oestmann said.
Owned by the town since 1997, the Vine Cottage has made headlines in recent months as its future as a public property is an open question.
In early 2017, a proposal to renovate the building for $550,000 was rejected by the Town Council. Some in town suggested that the true cost of maintaining it might be as low as $220,000. In the summer of 2018, Moynihan said that the building would likely be sold, and though then-Selectman Kit Devereaux pushed back on the move, the selectmen voted 2-1 in June 2019 to approve the RFP. A field of four interested parties was narrowed down to two contenders, Robert Cuda and Arnold Karp, Moynihan has said. Cuda died in December 2019, and the negotiations with Karp—owner of the former Red Cross building next door—slowed amid the pandemic, town officials said.
Moynihan announced in February that the Vine Cottage may be retained by the town as the Health Department’s home, and it later was revealed that the New Canaan Land Trust had put in a bid for it two months prior. Moynihan responded during a subsequent public meeting that the nonprofit organization’s offer was low.
Here’s a history of the Vine Cottage from the New Canaan Museum & Historical Society.