If you attended this week’s Colonie Town Board meeting, you may have noticed something different.
The boardroom looks different from six months ago, when carpeting lined the walls and file cabinets cluttered the back wall.
The town’s General Services department has been working over the past five months to bring the boardroom, in which Town Board meetings and several other functions involving town residents are held, to modernization according to Director of General Services Doug Sippel.
Basically, the room hadn’t been touched or had any renovations or modifications done to it in a number of years, said Sippel. `The last year and a half, the numbers of people who were actually coming to the meetings was kind of exceeding what was comfortable to fit in that room.`
The room once held a capacity of 155 people. It will now hold 325.
Mike Tenace, an employee of the General Services Department who has been working on the project described the boardroom as `the jewel of the Town of Colonie` and said the room should reflect that. He and Ron Taylor, another employee of the department, helped pick out the designs used in the new room.
Tenace said the room was once used for the Colonie Town Court, and that the back of the room was where the judge would sit. The defendants would line up along the walls of the room and wait to go in and talk to the judge. Over the past 10 years, the room has been transformed to hold meetings of the Town Board, as well as several other meetings of town organizations and groups.
The project was done entirely in-house and using about $4,600 for materials from the general services budget. An additional $2,863 will be used to update the sound system in the room, allowing each board member to have their own microphone as opposed to sharing one or two.
The project began with the stripping of the carpeting off the walls (The carpeting covered the bottom half of all the walls surrounding the room ` Tenace said defendants use to kick the walls while waiting in the courtroom). Next, the department converted the section behind the panel where the board members sit to a storage room that will hold extra chairs and the file cabinets that formerly stood in the back of the room.
The department also replaced where the carpeted paneling was with wainscot paneling that covers the front of the new panel the board members sit behind.
The panel at which the board members, supervisor, town clerk and town attorney sit was pushed farther back against the wall.
`We now have extra space, which is part of the goal,` said Supervisor Paula Mahan. Mahan said there are times in which the meetings get a large crowd and now the room will be able to house a larger crowd with the added space.
Modifications were made to allow handicapped access to the panel, Sippel said, in case a board member is ever injured or handicapped.
Mahan said it was also important to complete renovations of the room so that the room would better meet fire regulations.
Mahan said the design concept of the new room was not the product of just one person.
`We put our heads together and came up with a plan,` she said. Mahan also said she was pleased that the town was able to complete the project in house. She said, she would also like to have more recessed lighting.
Sippel said the work on the room is not yet complete. The sound system still needs to be put in place, as well as chair rails placed on the edges of the wainscot paneling.
According to Sippel, the renovation projects began in January and he hopes the project will be complete by the end of May.
Gloria Jean Knorr, a Loudonville resident and frequent attendee of Town Board meetings, said she was pleased with the renovations.
`It’s very neat and clean,` she said. `The room looks bigger.`
When asked whether she thought the new look of the room could inspire more residents to come out to meetings, Knorr said, `I don’t know, I think it would still depend on the topics.`
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