POLICE: EX-CHAMBER WORKER STOLE $55,000
Committee members hope new blueprint will bring price down within town’s $1.7M budget
A former Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce employee has been accused of embezzling nearly $55,000 from the agency.
Jennifer Chauvin, 43, of Hanover has been charged with first-degree larceny. According to an arrest warrant, she had worked for the chamber from Aug. 8, 2014, until she was fired on Oct. 19, 2018. During those four years, she is accused of embezzling $54,919.15 from the chamber.
The chamber had fired Chauvin for breach of trust and performance issues that were not related to the larceny, the warrant said.
East Lyme — Public Safety Building Vision Committee members on Thursday reviewed newly revised concept plans for the town’s proposed policing facility after objections were raised to a higher-than-expected $5.8 million renovation estimate presented to the committee late last month.
Compared to the original plan, which took up 22,537 square feet spread across two floors in the building, the new plan features renovations on just the first floor of the building, taking up 16,938 square feet, which committee members are hoping will bring the price down to within the town’s $1.7 million budget for the project.
Vision Committee Chairman Paul
Dagle, who is also a selectman, said that contracted building architects Silver/Petrucelli + Associates have not yet provided new cost estimates, but committee members would receive them by Monday to discuss at another meeting planned for Tuesday night.
A previous cost breakdown presented by architects showed that renovations would cost about $248 per square foot. Dagle said he was not sure yet whether the price per square foot would decrease, but that, “We’re expecting the price to come down closer to the budget.”
“I just know that, with the decrease in the total square footage and some effect of not having to worry about means of egress because we aren’t on the second floor at all, the price is coming down,” Dagle said.
Committee members added that the latest plans could save hundreds of thousands of dollars by not replacing an HVAC system and skipping over repaving the parking lot.
A downgraded generator also will save at least $100,000, member Bill Cornelius said.
Dagle said more savings may be found when the town has a better understanding of which Americans with Disabilities Act and other building requirements must be followed.
Building official Steve Way had previously told The Day the town may be able to save money by structurally upgrading only certain parts of the building, such as its Emergency Operations Center.
Way also had told The Day that the building may not need to be fully retrofitted with sprinklers, depending on which modifications can be obtained from the state. Should holding cells be built, that part of the building would need to be retrofitted with sprinklers, he said.
The town still needs to obtain modifications to bypass certain building requirements from the state’s building official.
Voters in a February referendum approved spending up to $5 million to purchase and renovate the former 30,000-square-foot Honeywell office building at 277 West Main St. into a consolidated space that would house a new police facility, as well as the town’s dispatch center, fire marshal’s office and emergency operations center.
Having closed on the building in May for about $2.77 million, the town is now left with approximately $1.7 million for repurposing the structure as a public safety facility, while the remaining $500,000 will be used to install communications wiring and dispatch equipment in the building.
But after Silver/Petrucelli + Associates said renovations could cost as much as $5.8 million at the Sept. 26 Public Safety Building Vision Committee meeting — $3.6 million more than provided by the approved bond issue — many residents, as well as some town officials, have since expressed worry that the project simply cannot come in on budget.
Principal architect William Silver of Silver/Petrucelli + Associates has since appeared before the Board of Selectmen to offer an explanation for the higher-than-expected renovation estimates. Silver said earlier this month that a “needs assessment” for the building, as well as the first “conceptual design,” presented to the Vision Committee on Sept. 26, was just the first phase of a multiple-step process between architects and the committee — a “planning tool,” he said, to begin the process and to “show the big picture” of the project, “to give you a sense of what the total responsibilities in the long run are going to be involved.”
According to comments submitted to the vision committee by police Chief Mike Finkelstein, who was not present at Thursday’s meeting, the new plan is “workable.”
“He understands and we all understand that we are trying to minimize the amount of work in this building and maximize it as an office building,” Dagle said.
Most committee members at Thursday’s meeting also expressed content with the newly outlined plans and said it made sense to keep the plans to just the first floor, saving the second floor for expansion of other town departments in the future.
Member Lisa Picarazzi, who is also vice chairwoman of the finance board, raised concerns with the building’s roof, asking that the committee receive an accurate lifespan for it. According to initial price estimates, a new roof would cost more than $370,000. Picarazzi also said she wanted to ensure that the size of the Information Technology room provides adequate space for its systems, saying that Stonington police had told her, while she was touring their building, that their IT room is too small and to learn from their mistake.
Dagle said he would add her concerns to the list of questions to ask architects.
Holding cells also were designed into the scheme presented Thursday. Dagle said that was to help price out how much the cells would cost, which will be further determined when the committee goes out to bid on contracted renovations for the building. Once the committee has the final price of the holding cells, Dagle said it will then make a recommendation to the Board of Selectmen on whether the cells should be built as part of the building now or to wait until later.
The Board of Finance voted during a Jan. 23 special meeting to decrease the amount the town is allowed to bond out for the project, unanimously approving $5 million — $2.77 million to purchase the building and $2.23 million for renovations. That was below the initial nearly $6 million request based on estimates First Selectman Mark Nickerson and the task force obtained from experts.
Cutting $1 million from the original request, the board acknowledged, would mean potentially putting off installing proposed holding cells. In Silver/Petrucelli + Associates’ original presentation, holding cells were estimated to cost just over $1 million.
Dagle said that should the holding cells be built, the committee also would need to account for how much it would cost to hook up the building to the town’s water system, which would be needed for the sprinkler system required in the holding cell area.
Dagle said the town is planning to connect the police building property to a water line that soon will be brought down through a proposed affordable-housing development — known as Rocky Neck Village — currently being planned just north of the police building.
Dagle said those costs are not currently part of the $5 million budget.
Reviewing the vision committee’s charter, Dagle said, “Our goal is to get those four organizations in this building and make sure it’s functional so that they can go do their job and be in a much better environment than the one they’re in today.”
“And if for some reason, we think we are taking a shortcut here, cramming all this here into the square footage, or cramming it in to meet the cost, it’s our responsibility to identify that,” Dagle said. “We are going to have to continue to evaluate this. A lot of things will evolve. This is our second or third step to get a concept to meet our needs and budget.”