Expected to be completed by early June for about $500,000, the renovation of the North Providence Department of Public Works is a bargain town officials say was made possible by donated materials and an unusual cost-saving measure.
Aside from the architectural and engineering work, the renovation is being completed by municipal employees. Director of Administration Rocco Gesualdi said using those municipal workers also have other benefits, including assuring quality workmanship and heightening employee morale.
“We have a lot of talented people here – masons, carpenters, electricians. And the guys up there that are involved with the project have a new sense of pride,” Gesualdi said. “They feel as though they’re producing something, rather than just going to work, doing their eight hours and going home. It’s a good lift of morale.”
To date, town employees have completed additions of a mansard roof, 14 new garage doors and a waste-oil heating plant at the 2 Mafalda Road facility.
The waste-oil plant will save money by allowing the town to better dispose of waste oil from the more than 100 municipal vehicles, “so in effect, we’ll be getting free heat,” Gesualdi said. “And it will probably, actually, generate a profit for us.”
Also planned is a 3,000-square-foot addition that will primarily be occupied by town inspectors. This spring, the building will get a brick-façade facelift. And town employees will landscape the property, adding greenery and a fence that will better blend the facility with its residential surroundings, Gesualdi said.
The building, which is more than 30 years old, had been in severe disrepair last year.
It didn’t have an adequate heating system. Doors were broken. Windows were missing. The roof was so poorly patched and deteriorating that, sometimes, “it was raining so hard inside that you had to carry an umbrella. And that’s no joke,” Gesualdi said.
So town voters approved spending between $2.2 million and $2.4 million for a new garage that would have relocated the DPW to Smithfield Road. But when Mayor Charles Lombardi took office during April 2007, he pushed for the alternative: renovating the existing garage with about $500,000 in voter-approved money, with much of the building materials donated.
In another attempt to save money, he negotiated the donation of more than $100,000 in building materials from the former Rizzo Ford building – owned by North Providence’s Notorantonio family – on the corner of Mineral Spring and Douglas avenues. That building was set to be knocked down, but when Lombardi was driving by one morning, he noticed that much of the external heating ducts and equipment were near brand new.
“He called up and said, ‘Hey, we’d like to have all that stuff if it’s just going to be thrown away,’” Gesualdi said.
Inside the DPW renovation, many of the ceiling tiles, electrical and fire alarm panels and about $60,000 in glass vestibules were taken away from the doomed Rizzo Ford building.
The DPW project is about 300,000 square feet larger than the proposed replacement and “I’d guess that we’re probably somewhere around 35-40 cents on the dollar compared to what it would have cost us,” Gesualdi said.
He added, “And what that allows us to do, or allows the mayor to do, is utilize the available funds from the $2.2 million [for other] renovations around the town.”
Those other renovations include upgrading the fire and police stations – each has had a new roof installed – as well as renovating the town hall and libraries.
“What this has done is brought a lot of our infrastructure back up to where it should be,” Gesualdi said.
And a portion of those funds went toward the purchase of another North Providence parcel. On Mineral Spring Avenue, the town purchased a former Chinese restaurant next to the police and fire headquarters.
“That’s going to be turned into a municipal annex,” Gesualdi said, adding that it will create a “one-stop shop” when the fire marshal and administrative offices are moved there.
The $150,000 renovation – including a new roof and small expansion – is under way now and the offices are expected to be opened by June 1. •
