A Woodstock entity is buckling under pressure. It is not a person or department under stress, but a building.
The pressure is not coming from an activist group or neighborhood organization, but from the town’s own files.
Spectrum News recently took a look at the strain facing the 100-year-old Comeau Building on Comeau Drive. The building houses the building and planning departments, the clerk’s office and all the recent files they generate.
What You Need To Know
- A strained 100-year-old Woodstock town building is being reinforced by a pole on the ground floor
- Employees in the building are concerned the files from three departments are putting stress on the building
- The town supervisor is trying to revive a renovation project that stalled at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic
Woodstock Deputy Clerk Michele Sehwerert told Spectrum News about “that one time with the ceiling” when chunks of plaster fell on her and her co-worker.
“All of a sudden, we heard this crack and then boom,” Sehwerert recalled, sitting at her desk pointing to where plaster started falling. “She got covered and I got covered in plaster. It was quite scary.”
Woodstock Town Clerk Jackie Earley showed Spectrum News around the second and third floors, showing closets, cabinets and stacks of recent files that are causing the strain.
“Town clerk records are here. We keep six years of our records up here,” she said, pointing to various boxes on the third floor. “Everything else goes to permanent storage if we need to. You have some bookkeeping. You have summer camps. Over here is the assessor’s boxes. They’re recent, 2014 and up.”
Earley used a recent grant to store all the town’s older paper records at a nearby town-owned building. Her team is digitizing the records to free up space, but that is a long-term project and does not fix the damage already done at the Comeau Building.
Pointing to a model for possible renovations, Town Supervisor Bill McKenna said that in early 2020, the town was about to begin the project.
“The COVID pandemic last year really slowed things down,” he said. “We were almost ready to go out to bond for the project ... We put it on hold for a year, and now I’m hopeful we’ll be ready to move forward.”
McKenna said that for the moment, the building is safe to work in after a steel pole was installed on the first floor to support the sloping second floor.
McKenna estimated the project would cost about $2.8 million. He said the town has about $2 million to put toward the project and may seek a bond to make up the difference.