The Board of Selectmen at its most recent meeting approved about $28,000 to work on a former incinerator building at the Transfer Station, including removal of one stack.
The selectmen at their March 25 meeting also approved funds to patch the roof of the building and relocate a radio antenna used by Department of Public Works vehicle operators.
“We have two incinerator buildings,” Public Works Director Tiger Mann said at the meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. “This is the one that houses the salt area and the Swap Shop. It was decommissioned in the ‘90s. And one of the two stacks needs to be removed, at best. We’re still looking at what to do with the overall building and how to bring it down safely eventually. Since it was an incinerator, it’s a heavy environmental cost to do that. Plus its location—sitting on top of the highway department—makes its location very difficult, as well, since a portion of the highway department sits underneath the incinerator itself, actually where the ash floor came out. So right now we just like to be able to remove this so that it doesn’t come down onto the roof.”
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of contracts with Stamford Wrecking (stack removal), Antonelli Roofing (roof repair) and Northeast Communications (antenna relocation).
Asked about long-term plans for the building and specific uses it has, Mann said that at the moment “it houses our salt” for the roads.
“We’re one of the only towns in the state that doesn’t have a dome,” Mann said. “We can’t dump salt in the area. We have to dump it outside and push it in. We have to bring it out to load a truck.”
Making a point he’s made before, Mann noted that the town did have a plan to create a salt dome at the Transfer Station site 25 years ago, but it never happened.
“The thought is to take this building down and place a proper salt barn there with an Animal Control building, because that’s the building next to it,” Mann said. “And then possibly a Swap Shop. There’s enough area there to reutilize. We have the money to study that proposal to see exactly what it’d be. We had some preliminary estimates in the $4.5 million to $5 million range to have this done. So at that point in time, we wanted to take a step back, take a look, and see exactly what we can do. What’s the path forward and what’s the best method to actually take the building down? Since it sits over the top of the highway department—it’s literally above the lunchroom—do we knock it into the highway department and then rebuild that portion of the highway department? Do we just try to lift it all off? There’s a lot of factors involved.”
Carlson said there’s no grant money available for such a project “because it was a town-created problem.”
“We’re trying to skin the cat a few different ways, but it’s not an inexpensive [project],” she said.
Mann said the salt dome need would re-emerge as a DPW priority after the Police Department renovation and expansion is complete.
“We did originally look at areas on the capped landfill to see if we could put in a salt dome and then be able to just knock that building down and go forward,” he said. “We were not. We can place something on the cap, but it’s cost-prohibitive at that point in time. So we said it would be much better to just come back to the area that we have and look. Now we’ve just got to go back out, hire the proper consultant to take a look and see exactly what is possible in that location. So that’s our next step.”
Carlson said that such a project “isn’t anywhere on the five-year capital plan.”
“We have to get the numbers, we have to get where it fits on the five year capital plan. because we’ve already had—as we’ve all discussed—we have to go on a debt diet in this town,” Carlson said. “Moody’s communicated that clearly in both last year and this year’s rating call. I think Todd Lavieri in his letter to the community articulated that we have to be more judicious in how we spend. And there’s a lot of big projects on the horizon, so we just need to figure it out. It needs to be laid out with cost estimates in the five-year capital plan so that we can figure out where it fits in the five-year capital plan.”
Murphy Carroll said the town should put in a placeholder and Carlson said, “Absolutely.”