Special Board of Aldermen Public Hearing — 12/16/2019 Page 6
Joel Ackerman, Board of Public Works Commissioner
Thank you Director; Joel Ackerman, Board of Public Works Commissioner. As you know the Department of
Public Works oversees several facilities. The new building committee project in question, we looked at the four
Administrative Facilities comprising the Administration and Engineering Office; Street Departments; Solid
Waste; and Parks & Rec. Currently the administration offices at these four locations provide an unhealthy
work environment for the City’s employees. Our immediate areas of concern include visible evidence of mold,
below standard air quality and live rodent activity, in adequate bathroom facilities, lack of useable office space,
inadequate storage, over-crowded lunch room and too few conference rooms available. Equally as important,
limited parking present insurmountable challenges every day for the City employees and visitors alike. Lastly,
each of these facilities are not within the ADA Federal Compliance Regulation. Nashua, as we know, is
growing exponentially, housing, traffic, streets, waste management, as well as proper sewer management and
engineering projects all require more and more attention of the Department of Public Works. The present
facilities are not equipped or prepared to meet this growth if we do not take such much needed change. Our
goal is to provide a healthy environment for our much valued City employees. Thank you.
Ms. Fauteux
Thank you Commissioner Ackerman. Rob Prunier of Harvey Construction will now present the study that they
completed comparing renovation of our existing facilities to building a new facility. | think I'll hand this over to
you.
Rob Prunier, Harvey Construction
Good evening everyone, my name is Rob Prunier and | am with Harvey Construction Corporation. | am here
tonight to make your night as exciting as possible and | am sure all these slides are going to be very enthralling
to you but it was part of the due diligence that we were asked to help the Department of Public Works with to
really assess their current facilities and what it would take to bring those facilities up to snuff. With that we
went ahead and we are not architects, we are builders, so we really took a perspective from a building
perspective. We looked at the Admin Building, the Streets Department, the Solid Waste parking and Parks &
Rec Department. We were focused on the office components of each of these facilities and that is important to
really hone in on is that we are talking about the administration and office aspects of these programs.
We went in and we analyzed each building, visually, physically, we asked a lot of questions. We tried to
conceptualize some thoughts in terms of what each Department needed for future growth and future
programmatic benefits to each Department. We tried to put numbers together for each one of those buildings
so that you could make some educated decisions on whether or not or where you want to invest your money.
The first building we looked at was the Administrative Building. Again these are the slides that are really going
to excite you. The DPW Administration really utilizes the front of this building, the back and the side is used
more for the Police Department for storage and what have you. The DPW utilizes the first and second floor;
the first floor is about 9,600 square feet and the second floor is about 8,700 square feet. So our task was “how
do we renovate those areas to bring them up to code, to bring them to where systems are adequate for every
day work”. There was a small reorganization of the front entry way with bathrooms and reception areas
including an elevator that needed to be put in. It still did not meet all programmatic needs of the Administrative
Offices. They needed a little bit more space, we said, “Where can we put that space in conjunction with this
building”. The area in the red there is the only space that made sense. We went through a little of a
programmatic effort, played architect for a little bit and came up with some ideas in terms of what they needed
and this is the result of that. So it was about an additional 2,200 square feet, one story. Of course that means
you are taking some parking out so we had to figure out where we could put some more parking. Again the
area in the red identifies that area and it is kind of a net on the parking side of things. But that allows you to
get the parking and the space you need.
