Board discusses St. Paul’s construction cost estimates



As the Garden City Village Board of Trustees convened for the last time prior to the Village election on March 21, the future of historic St. Paul’s remained the key contested topic.

 The March 16 Board meeting featured a presentation of the construction cost estimates recently released by Westerman Construction Co.

The company presented costs for three options: adaptive reuse, facadism and building demolition. According to the report by Westerman’s firm to the village, the costs for three scenarios would be:

Demolition – $17,678,312

Adaptive reuse (first phase) – $49,526,287

Façadism  – $46,444,836 to save the south facade and build a one story building behind it.

The report was delivered to the Board by Lloyd Westerman, principal of the firm. Mayor Cosmo Veneziale started the evening’s presentation with a recap of his 2021 initiative to develop an all-volunteer committee to examine all facets of St. Paul’s past and future.

“Of all the residents who volunteered, none were excluded. Subcommittees were formed to address critical issues such as program and use, legal, architecture and engineering, history and communications. The Mayor’s St. Paul’s Committee has spent thousands of hours conducting research, analysis outreach and public presentations to determine the potential for adaptive reuse or potential demolition of the St. Paul’s main building,” he noted.

Westerman’s team had also delivered the information to residents on Monday March 13 at the sixth St. Paul’s informational meeting. 

Questions about Adaptive Reuse

Resident Bob Orosz asked a few questions about the costs involved with restoring the structure for adaptive reuse. He also asked why multiple stages were outlined in the cost estimates, because the costs would involve preliminary work once the building is adequately prepared for an adaptive reuse.

Orosz noted the “first phase” was  referenced in Westerman’s report wondered what the village had “to look forward to” down the road. 

In the first phase in the adaptive reuse scenario, St. Paul’s middle section – the main entrance, the current chapel area, and the second floor area would be brought up to code for public use. The rest of the building would need to be brought up to code for life safety issues such as a sprinkler system and heating/HVAC but not to code for occupancy. 

His next question was about sealing and weather-proofing the building for an adaptive reuse, and the consulting team explained that the building could be restored “nicely” but could not be in condition like it was in the late 1800s and early 1900s. An adaptive reuse design would make the building watertight; elements of the facade wouldn’t fall off and it would pass all building codes. 

Mayor Cosmo Veneziale explained that because St. Paul’s is listed on the New York State and National Register of Historic Places, it does not have to meet energy code requirements of the state. “Historic buildings are exempt from energy code compliance. It can be a good idea to do it if you can but we would not be required to do it,” he shared.    

Westerman’s team member said of all the schemes the final cost of an adaptive reuse would come down to for what it was to be used. A renovated St. Paul’s would be brought up to code based on the anticipated programs that would be placed there.

“When you decide what the program is then you would decide what the codes to meet are. With building use of warehouses and schools, etc, there are specific codes that must be followed and that leads to occupancy limits and how many people would use it, structural and fire codes, etc. In estimating adaptive reuse we followed what was presented with the village master planning and research of previous Board meetings throughout the years,” they explained.   

Is the building hazardous to health?

Meadow Street resident Steve Ilardi, a former East POA president, said over the years he consistently attended the Board of Trustees’ meetings and had heard many times about the conditions inside of St. Paul’s “being so hazardous that you needed a HAZMAT suit to go in” yet the report from Westerman details their ability to tour inside without masks on as there wasn’t a smell. 

Superintendent of Building Giuseppe Giovanniello responded that St. Paul’s had been tested and its air quality was normal. “Being in the building many times, you can walk throughout the building without a mask. If someone prefers to wear a mask or HAZMAT suit then that’s fine, but we did have the building cleaned and you can at least walk through it on the first and second floors. There are bricks and building parts that collapsed on the lower level, to the basement, but the overall air quality inside St. Paul’s is safe to walk through,” Giovanniello said. 

Another clarification Giovanniello offered is that the Building Department was tasked with reviewing only St. Paul’s first floor and second floor for safe occupancy. Therefore, if a certificate of occupancy was granted for those two floors it would need to be revisited for floors three through five, in time. 

“We can C.O. sections of the building accordingly – health and safety is a factor, the fire marshal has to walk through the building, fire alarm and sprinkler have to be done, ADA requirements need to be done,  in order to make the building safe depending on whoever is using/occupying it. But the main section of the building that would be used could be C.O.’d first and we could issue them one section at a time, as I have done for commercial buildings throughout the village and depending on how the building is split up,” the superintendent stated.  

Demolition discussed

Over Zoom resident Bob Wolff asked about potential for demolition, and how if a company does the demolition work it may take some of the items and structure being demolished, as a part of the payment from Garden City. 

Wolff also challenged Westerman on why the Comparative Analysis did not include design costs. The report contains a one-year escalation cost of 3% and Wolff wanted to know what that might cover. The consultants said the increase represented an arbitrary number related to a cost of living increase. Wolff contended that the project would never be done within one year so the variable for increases should be a percentage reflecting up to three years. 

Trustee Bruce Chester asked about a calculation of the Façadism presentation and the notation of creating a 100,000 square-foot building. Lloyd Westerman explained that the original St. Paul’s main building stands at approximately 120,000 square feet. He said his team planned that façadism would mean leaving an original area covering 25,000 square feet – involving the aggregate of the original floors to remain. He told the board the team was tasked with “providing a new building considerably in size to what the old building was.” 

Regarding a potential demolition cost factor, Ilardi also asked about material that needs to be salvaged inside St. Paul’s – “architectural material” which the report suggested would need to go into secured climate-controlled storage, possibly in the southwest due to a more favorable climate. 

Ilardi asked if there was a way for Garden City to make an agreement with a company that might salvage such historic material, and they would take possession of it. Mayor Veneziale explained that is a possibility as it is commonly done in his field of architecture and construction.

“The Village does not have to take possession of anything. This salvaging process would be a mandatory part of the demolition because St. Paul’s is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; there are certain requirements. The New York State Historic Preservation Office would allow the demolition of the building but they would place some conditions on that, including work to save certain elements of the building including exterior and interior elements, and those would be some requirements in order to get a demolition permit,” the mayor said.   

The presentation to the board concluded with public comment from resident Don MacLeod, who questioned Mayor Veneziale about the use of MacLeod’s name on a handout which had been distributed at the March 13th St. Paul’s Committee meeting.

The handout had associated MacLeod’s name with a scenario in which the adaptive reuse of the building would also include a large athletic facility. This scenario was not part of the Westerman report.

Trustees Mary Carter Flanagan (the mayor-elect) and Charles Kelly also voiced their concerns that their names appeared on the handout without their knowledge, for other scenarios. 

“I wrote a letter to The Garden City News to keep it simple – to keep it cheap, and be inexpensive and because I have some questions particularly looking at the construction projects the village has had including the Nassau Boulevard train station, the village has limited bandwidth. The title of the commentary was ‘Keep it Simple’ because as a village we do not seem to handle infrastructure projects like the repositioning of a 150-year-old historical building. When I see it is potentially a 100,000 square-foot and five-story building, I don’t think it is anything I suggested. I also suggested monumentism and you seemed to have ignored that…When it fit your agenda, and your agenda is clear, you had no problem attaching my name to it,” MacLeod said.

He asserted that the outline circulated with the use of his name and the two trustees, Charles Kelly and Mary Carter Flanagan, was intended to embarrass them.

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