State money to fund City Hall work

WATERVLIET, N.Y.>> The City Council voted Thursday night to move forward with work to update City Hall.

Mayor Michael Manning said the city will receive more than $100,000 in grant money from the state Assembly and the Dormitory Authority of the State of NewYork as part of the State and Municipal Facilities Program for the rehabilitation work.

“The grant is administered by DASNY and there’s a series of ap- provals in the Assembly, approvals in DASNY, back to the Assembly and then back to DASNY, so this grant has been batted around and the action we took with this Thursday night was to declare it a Type II, non-environmental issue,” explained Manning. “We can now finalize the paper work and go out for bids.”

Manning said a majority of the workwill be done inside the threestory building on 15th Street. “The theme of the project is to make the workspace more efficient for the employees and for the public,” said Manning. “We have three floors in City Hall, [but] the third floor is hardly used at all because people have to go up a couple flights of stairs. We have someoperations on the first floor and then a lot of them on the second floor, so the theme is to reorganize the downstairs floor plan so that most of the customer service activities are downstairs.”

Manning said he does not see much work needed on the building’s exterior.

“The only thing that would affect the exterior would be if we reroute entryways or something like that,” explained Manning.

City Hall has not been worked on in many years and Manning said the fact that the Assembly offers such grants helped the city to do this work without digging into its annual budget.

“City Hall is an old building, and it was set upwhen things like having to go up a flight of stairs weren’t as important,” said Manning. “The fact that the Assembly is offering these [grants] is huge because this would be stuff that would have to be very low priority in budgeting.”

Manning said he anticipates workwill start later this year, with someoffices being temporarily relocated within the building once work begins.