The Windham Town Council has scheduled a Nov. 3 referendum seeking funds for the construction of a $7.66 million, 29,000-square-foot public works and maintenance building on Windham Center Road.

If approved, the new facility would replace the 8,783-square-foot existing structure, which was constructed in 1979 on a 29.5-acre site on the southerly side of Windham Center Road. The facility, which services both municipal and Regional School Unit 14 transportation and maintenance activities, has been periodically renovated through the years, with a 14,000-square-foot sand and salt shed built on site in 2000.

Town officials say the facility is generally too small and is poorly designed, leading to frequent complications as public works and bus drivers cross paths with each other and drive over ill-defined areas of stockpiled materials such as road gravel. Due to a scarcity of truck bays, public works trucks are left outside during the winter, leading to service delays and the need for premature equipment replacement and repairs.

The proposed bond principal is $7,657,193 for the project, and projected interest on the bond is an additional $2,508,880, raising the long-term project cost to $10,166,073. Although the town officially holds about $21 million in outstanding and unpaid debt service, nearly $16 million of the unpaid debts are connected to the expansion and renovation of Windham High School, and are the responsibility of Regional School Unit 14.

According to Town Manager Tony Plante, although the referendum is officially a special town meeting, it will occur by ballot during the regular state election.

“It has to be treated as a special town meeting but it will just be voting at the polls on Nov. 3,” he said.

In 1999, voters rejected a $3.9 million bond to construct a new public works and maintenance facility at the Windham Center Road site. In April of this year, the Town Council signed a $59,500 contract with the Portland-based Allied Engineering design firm to produce a schematic design narrative that updates a 1999 feasibility study associated with the construction bond floated that year for the proposed facility.

The updated schematic design proposes a two-story, 120-by-195-foot building, featuring 12 garage bays, a variety of administrative offices, locker rooms, conference rooms, kitchenettes, storage rooms, a carpentry shop, and a meeting room for 30-50 people, among other features. The facility would be built where the existing leaf and brush area is located, in the southwest portion of the lot.

The proposed building would feature a red-iron steel frame superstructure. The 5,400-square-foot administrative section of the building, which would be the section visible from Windham Center Road, would be designed to emulate a “rural neighborhood appearance,” with a roof featuring pitched gable trusses and roof shingles with standing seam metal roofing at entrance canopies. The exterior of the administrative section would feature a brick veneer wainscot, cement-composite clapboard and shingle siding.

The facility design is geared toward servicing 35 school district employees and 20 public works employees. According to Plante, if approved by voters, the town’s Buildings and Grounds administrative team will move from offices next to the gym at town hall and into the new facility.

Town officials have decided to use cost estimates that are much higher than initial projections produced last year. The Sept. 5, 2014, draft of the Municipal Facilities and Space Needs Study and Master Plan, produced by the Portland-based engineering and planning firm SMRT, projected the new public works facility would cost $4.4 million. Meanwhile, the schematic design published by Allied Engineering on July 17 projected the much heftier price tag of $7.62 million for the facility.

The town did not ask SMRT to factor in the space needs of the Regional School Unit 14 transportation and maintenance staff into the projections, according to Plante. That’s why the public works facility in the master plan was projected to be nearly 23,000 square feet and the proposal from Allied Engineering is 29,000 square feet, he said.

To Plante, the discrepancy in scope primarily explained the 21 percent increase in square footage for the proposed new facility. However, it did not explain the 42 percent increase in total cost, he said. According to SMRT principal, David Mains, the lead author of the master plan, recent inflation of material costs could have played a factor in the discrepancy.

The council, which paid $32,000 for SMRT’s master plan last fall, has requested that Mains come to a council meeting to discuss the discrepancies in the master plan.