Space Heaters At Canaan House—

Heat Is On Town Leaders To Winterize Town Offices At Fairfield Hills

By John Voket

Community Leaders and members of the Ad Hoc Fairfield Hills Management Committee are examining several alternatives to rectifying the lack of central heating in town offices at Canaan Hall. Town employees who work in the imposing facility near the center of the former state hospital campus have been relying on space heaters since the boiler blew up late last year.

But Ad-Hoc Committee Chairman John Reed and First Selectman Herbert Rosenthal both agreed that space heaters will not sustain staffers in Canaan Hall for another winter. Adding to the complexity of the situation, Mr Rosenthal said earlier this week, is that hazardous substance remediation and demolition at that building and neighboring structures may require moving all town offices from Canaan Hall to alternative locations.

The timeline to make expensive and expedient decisions is rapidly accelerating, Mr Reed said at a meeting of the management committee last Thursday. Options and answers were needed so quickly, that the committee voted to conduct a special meeting this Thursday to continue examining options and costs related to the project.

“Canaan House is one big unknown,” Mr Reed told the panel last Thursday. “As far as heating the building is concerned, space heaters may work fine until late October or early November, but after that we owe it to our town employees to make their offices livable.”

Replacing the destroyed boiler with another used furnace, which is now located in Greenwich House, would cost about $200,000 before it was ever employed to begin heating the massive facility. Currently, less than 25 percent of the building is occupied.

According to Mr Rosenthal, the cost to relocate the boiler is about $100,000, with an additional $100,000 estimated to refit the unit to the existing heating infrastructure and to replace heat exchanges on hundreds of steam radiators throughout the building.

Maria DiMarco, a representative of the temporary management firm overseeing operations at the campus, said it was unclear whether zones could be established to minimize the need to heat vast unused areas of the building. In the worst-case scenario, she estimated, it could cost up to an additional $150,000 in heating oil to get through this winter.

The continued use of Canaan House remains in question, however. Mr Reed said that future use of the building would depend on the successful demolition of its two remote wings. At press time, Mr Rosenthal was working to determine if either this factor or the remediation and trucking of hazardous materials from this and other adjacent locations would require a short- to medium-term evacuation of the building.

During the meeting, Mr Reed identified options for the Canaan House staff.

Moving all offices to one or more commercial buildings in town is one alternative, because there is little or no space to relocate into other town-owned properties. Mr Rosenthal stressed that it was vital for certain offices to be grouped together to allow for logical continuity of services.

“You really need to have the fire marshal, zoning and land use offices, and the Health Department located in proximity,” he said. “We could have the Board of Education in a different location, but we can’t have people driving from one place to another to get their land-related business taken care of.”

As of Monday, Mr Rosenthal was working with Community Development Director Elizabeth Stocker to identify the limited areas of commercial space in town to possibly relocate. But adequate space to relocate all the town offices would require a total of 15,000 to 20,000 square feet, Mr Rosenthal said.

In a printout of available commercial space provided to The Bee by Ms Stocker last Friday, only two suitable locations currently exist. There was about 15,000 square feet of office industrial space at 153 South Main Street, a property owned by SCB International, LLC, and some 16,000 square feet is available at 321 South Main Street, a property owned by John and Nancy Calas, according to the town assessor’s data.

An alternative, 174 Mt Pleasant Road, offers 10,500 square feet — enough for either Board of Education or Town Land Use and Health Department. That building is owned by the Grace Christian Fellowship, Inc LLC, according to the assessor’s office.

Another complex on Commerce Drive has 8,100 square feet of office space available, while a facility on Simm Lane has 5,900 square feet open for use.

The other alternative that officials are strongly considering, is the use of new, leased or purchased modular office space. While a long-term lease of 15,000–20,000 square feet of the portable, reconfigurable modulars could run between $1 million and $1.5 million, an outright purchase of a modular office complex may be considered as well.

Several Internet websites, including one for New Britain-based Resun, Inc, indicate that certain modular configurations can be reused over and over again, providing renewable municipal or educational functionality for clinics, day care centers, smaller offices, concession or event management, even law enforcement applications like jails or precinct suboffices.

Mr Rosenthal said the modular option may make most sense logistically. He said the offices can be located on flat paved areas near the campus’s main entrance, which would be far enough away from remediation and demolition activities to keep staffers and visitors safe, while providing the proximity to ease the move of people, furnishings, and equipment from Canaan Hall.

“These buildings are far from construction trailers,” Mr Rosenthal said. “The town has been successfully using modulars as school classrooms for some time, and the teachers I spoke with love them. They are clean and efficient to heat and cool, and when we are done with them, they can crank down a set of wheels underneath, and truck them to another location for reuse.”

A final option, which did not seem to meet with great enthusiasm from Ad-Hoc Committee members last Thursday, involved blocking off the areas of the building that were to be demolished, so that staff and visitors could continue using the central ground floor of Canaan Hall.

Mr Rosenthal said earlier this week that this option probably would not work because of the likelihood of hazardous dust, noise, and vibrations from the continual demolition affecting the town workers, visitors, and computer equipment there.