Westminster, Vt.
Costs have also risen, they acknowledged, because of problems at the site.
The facility, near the Interstate 91 access road at Exit 5, is intended to consolidate and replace obsolete barracks built decades ago on Route 103 in Rockingham and Route 9 in West Brattleboro. The patrol territory includes parts of southern Windsor County, including as far north as Windsor, and Windham County.
Besides providing modern facilities and better access to the interstate, the new barracks will also house a major 911 emergency dispatch center run by the Department of Public Safety. Construction began last spring, and State Police had hoped to move into the facility by last week. Now, state officials are hopeful, but uncertain, that they might do so by July 1.
The Vermont Department of Buildings and General Services, which is overseeing construction of the barracks, said the state needs to obtain new or amended permits from the state Department of Environmental Conservation and from the Westminster Development Review Board.
“The building is essentially done,” said Bob Rea, director of facilities and operations for Buildings and General Services. “The project right now is on hold pending receipt of … a state stormwater (discharge) permit. We had to submit new amended drawings to them.”
In addition, the state is now on the docket of the Westminter DRB in early June, because that panel has to approve any modification to the site plan it approved in November 2014.
Problems at the site have been two-fold.
First, the project was initially designed by an engineering firm working for the state to have a retention system in which stormwater from the 8-acre project would be held on site and infiltrate into the ground. Instead, “what was originally designed as an infiltration basin has now become a surface water lagoon” between the barracks and town property, according to an April 13 letter from the town’s lawyer, Lawrence Slason, to the DEC. And both the state and the town acknowledge that water has run off the site and caused some washouts.
“The retention pond was not completed, but it was obvious very quickly that after a couple of rain events, that water was not infiltrating into the ground on site,” Rea said. “It was starting to flow off the site, and we don’t question the fact that water from our site left, and went down, and exacerbated a problem that probably pre-existed.”
Westminster Town Manager Russell Hodgkins, who was the CEO of an excavation company for more than 30 years and was familiar with the site, said he told the engineer designing the drainage system for the state in 2014 that a retention system for a site that would soon house a large building and ample pavement would not be “a long-term fix if it worked at all.”
And, in fact, test borings of soil at the site this year found the silt content ranged from 89.5 percent to 95 percent, with moisture content “well above 30 percent,” according to the April 13 letter from Slason on behalf of the town, with permeability estimated at only .18 centimeters a day.
“Regrettably, as the town feared, the site is not suitable for an infiltration-based system,” Slason wrote.
The state has now proposed a detention system whereby the water from the lagoon would run via an outlet pipe onto town property and to a culvert.
Town officials have expressed concerns about the impact to their land, and to nearby Newcomb Brook, a cold water fishery.
The second issue is that in March, the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Compliance and Enforcement Division issued a notice of alleged violation, saying the contractor and excavator on the project, Naylor and Breen Builders of Brandon, Vt., and Fitzpatrick Excavating and Trucking, had “caused or allowed the dumping of hundreds of cubic yards of fill material” from the barracks site over a steep embankment on a neighboring parcel. The fill was then “sliding and flowing into Newcomb Brook,” the notice alleged.
Both state and town officials said the runoff from the faulty stormwater retention system had carried some of the fill into the brook.
Also cited in the notice of alleged violation were the town of Westminster, which owns the land where the fill was placed, and Roger Farnsworth, a local builder who has owned land around the site, as well. Messages left for Naylor and Breen, Fitzpatrick, and Farnsworth were not returned on Friday.
Rea said Farnsworth was working with Fitzpatrick to help remediate the damage.
Town officials have expressed frustration that Westminster — and not the state, which owns the barracks site where the fill came from — was cited in the notice.
“The town really was the innocent bystander in the whole mess,” Hodgkins said.
Kim Greenwood, the director of DEC’s Environmental Compliance Division, said by email that “The town of Westminster was listed because they own the land upon which the fill was deposited. In other words, the site involved in the investigation isn’t the site on which BGS is building the state police barracks, it’s the land on which the fill was deposited.”
Greenwood said the problem was being remediated and that the division would later assess whether any penalties might be issued.
At any rate, problems at the barracks site have cost time and money.
Rea said change orders since work began last year have added $278,000 to the project — in part from having to remove a “stump dump” and some buried fuel oil tanks on the site — with another $150,000 likely to complete the detention pond system. That would bring construction costs to more than $5.9 million, and when initial design and related costs are included, put the project at roughly $6.3 million.
Rea said his agency hopes to win the needed permits next month so the State Police can move into the building “not later than the end of June.”
“Whether that will happen, I don’t know. It becomes difficult for the State Police in the summer months. They have vacations, too, and it’s a hard time to make a major move like that,” Rea said.
News staff writer John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com or at 603-727-3217.