Recent Commissioner News

I was not able to attend the last Commissioners meeting due to a conflict, but I did hear back from one of our Friends group who went and spoke. The message that we have been trying to send to the Commissioner's is two fold. One is that we want them to withdraw the HARB application. As you know, the application was put on hold shortly before Election Day but it was not removed. In addition, the demolition request is still pending. Theoretically speaking they could implement both at any moment. Of course HARB would still reject it (we hope), but then we would get back to the same issue as before.

The cleaner way to do this is to start fresh when they have an interested party who wants to do an adaptive reuse on the property. All of the requests that are currently in place, albeit on hold, would need to be rewritten with the new requests on what specification the county wants to happen for an adaptive reuse rather than demolition.

Secondly, we want the Commissioners to be on the same page of support. Currently, only Commissioner DiBello supports saving the prison. Commissioner Winder and Commissioner Makhija are silent on the subject. If all parties are in support, our state legislators have indicated that funding is available for preservation efforts. In addition, there has been talk of increasing historic preservation credits in the State House - not just for this project, but others as well - and if all three are in favor of saving the building, our state legislators could advocate for funding and credits using the Commissioners unified support.

The report that I got back from our Friend who went to the meeting was that Winder and DiBello responded that they are working on this and will have something for us in April, and that they have been in contact with our state legislators. In addition, another Friend had heard back from the county Planning Commission that the County will engage a consultant to undertake a conditions assessment. The resulting report will then be made available in conjunction with the issuance of the RFI.

So, all in all, good news so far. Keeping our fingers crossed for more progress on this front.