Page 12 - BusinessWest February 3, 2025

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT >>
Chicopee Makes Some Landmark Improvements
BY GEORGE O’BRIEN
[email protected]
‘H
toric City Hall and the neighboring, long-closed main library.
In doing so, they made the distinction between this type of work and historic restoration.
Indeed, the latter returns something to what it once was at a specific point, said Pouliot, director of the city’s Planning Department, adding that this will not be the case with either building.
Indeed, the library, closed since 2004, when a new facility was built, will be renovated for use as a com- munity hub, home for a farmer’s market, and meeting space, said Pouliot, while phase 2 of a project at City Hall and its annex will involve an office-by-office reno- vation of spaces to suit current needs and technology and make the best use of those spaces.
“One purpose of the project is to right-size some of the office spaces; we have some offices that have too many people crammed into too small a space,”
he explained. “Another priority is building security. In working with all the department heads, we identified the offices that get the most visitation on a daily basis and tried to relocate them to the lower floors of the building, so we didn’t have the public accessing areas that they don’t need to.”
The City Hall project, which has been ongoing for a decade, has been slowed by the pandemic, but also a lengthy — as in more than three years — design phase that required large amounts of data collection from city department heads and employees about space requirements and specific needs.
Historic rehabilitation of the two downtown land- marks, work that has been ongoing through four mayoral administrations, is just one of the storylines involving Chicopee, the region’s second-largest city.
Others include everything from ongoing efforts to repurpose several old mills and create sorely
From left, Lee Pouliot, Krista Benoit, Brett Brown, and Bob Alger stand in the main entrance to the former main library in Chicopee, now undergoing historic rehabilitation for use as a community hub.
Staff Photo
needed new housing — projects that dovetail nicely, as we’ll see — to efforts at Elms College to cope
with the many issues and challenges in higher edu- cation today, especially the so-called demographic cliff, a sharp decline in the number of the number of 18-year-olds entering college. But there are others as well, including the soaring cost of higher education and the need to help students and their parents meet it, as well as free community college, which is both a challenge and an opportunity.
“One purpose of the project is to right- size some of the office spaces; we have some offices that have too many people crammed into too small a space.”
The college is taking steps to help bring that cost down and afford more opportunities for a college education through initiatives such as the recently announced Elms Promise, a financial-aid program designed to provide full tuition coverage for students from families earning less than $85,000 annually.
“The cost of a college education has been on the increase, and families’ income has not increased as fast as the rise in tuition,” Elms College President
Harry Dumay said in explaining the genesis of the program, adding that, since its inception, the school has placed an emphasis on being affordable for all types of students.
For this, the latest installment of its Community Spotlight series, we take an in-depth look at Chicop- ee and how it is building momentum — in all kinds of ways.
History in the Remaking
As they talked with BusinessWest in the former City Council meeting chambers on the fourth floor of City Hall, Pouliot; Krista Benoit, a project manager for Northampton-based D.A. Sullivan & Sons; and Bob Alger, senior project manager for NV5, a Hadley- based engineering firm, noted that the renovation of City Hall, opened in 1871, has been a decade-long project that essentially began when two panes of stained glass fell out of the rose window at the front of the building.
Then-Mayor Richard Kos asked Pouliot to under- take an emergency stabilization and historic-structure analysis to determine if there were physical deficien- cies in the building’s structure. Dietz & Company Architects of Springfield was hired to work on both, and the firm determined that there were a number of significant deficiencies that needed to be addressed in both City Hall and the annex.
Emergency stabilization work included everything from the removal of stones from the clocktower amid fear of them falling to removal of the stained glass throughout the building for protection, Alger said.
Following these initiatives, funding was secured for phase 1 of historic rehabilitation work, which entailed work on the building envelope and the HVAC systems, he went on, adding that this included roof replacement, stone and masonry repair, brick repair, replacement of all the windows in both buildings, and a stunning renovation of the auditorium, a $17 mil- lion endeavor overall.
Phase 2, a $16 million project, will involve a three-
istoric rehabilitation.’
That’s the phrase Lee Pouliot and others used to describe work at Chicopee’s his-
12 FEBRUARY 3, 2025
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Chicopee
at a Glance
Year Incorporated: 1848
Population: 55,560
Area: 23.9 square miles
County: Hampden
Residential Tax Rate: $15.16 Commercial Tax Rate: $32.62
Median Household Income: $35,672 Median Family Income: $44,136
Type of Government: Mayor; City Council
Largest Employers: Westover Air Reserve Base; J. Polep Distribution Services; Callaway Golf Ball Operations; Dielectrics; MicroTek
* Latest information available