In another step back from the disaster that was Tropical Storm Irene, 125 state employees have returned to a renovated building at the State Office Complex in Waterbury.
Earlier this month, the workers with the Agency of Human Services returned to the Weeks Building at the complex off South Main Street, after having been displaced since Irene hit the complex in 2011.
In all, more than 1,000 state employees were moved into offices elsewhere because Irene made much of the complex unusable.
At the end of 2015, state and local leaders cut the ribbon on a new 86,000-square-foot office building, 13 historic buildings that had been completely overhauled to provide an additional 115,000 square feet of space, and a 20,000-square-foot central plant and maintenance building.
Those buildings made up 90 percent of the complex; other buildings that were no longer serviceable were demolished.
The delay in the return of the 125 workers resulted from a shortfall in federal funds, leaving the state to come up with the money to complete the repairs, said Chris Cole, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Buildings and General Services.
“We completed work on the main campus, but there weren’t sufficient funds from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to repair all of the buildings,” Cole said.
For the past seven years, the displaced workers — many of whom work with the Department of Vermont Health Access, which administers Vermont’s publicly funded health insurance programs — worked out of leased office space in Williston.
According to Cole, bringing the workers back to Waterbury will save the state $370,000 a year.
“We’re much more cost-competitive than leasing from the private sector,” Cole said. “The benefit of having everyone under one roof is that it impacts our annual operating costs. It will cost less to host them. Putting them in a larger campus where we already have custodians and have mechanics, we will have some efficiencies of scale there.”
The Weeks Building is not the final step in completely repairing the damage from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. There is one more building left — the Stanley Building, which the flooding damaged beyond repair.
In 2018, the Department of Buildings and General Services received money to pay for demolition of the building. Cole said he expects bids to be sought this spring and demolition is likely during the summer.
“We still have 250-plus plus employees in leased space at Global Foundries,” Cole said. “Our hope is to bring them back in the not-too-distant future.”
