AHW's October Board Meeting will be held on the regularly scheduled 4th Thursday of the month at 4:30 pm at ONECU in Vergennes (48 Green St) and via Zoom. Please register below to receive the link and meeting materials.
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Thanks to AHW’s Family Support Program, she was able to meet with our support staff and complete a Mobile Home Repair (MHIR) application. Not only did our team help her access $6,203 in emergency repair funding, we were also able to help her connect with a contractor to complete the work.
Since her home was repaired, all the mold is gone and her roof is no longer leaking. Nancy has also noticed a positive change in heating her home. About Lazy Brook, she says, “the people are the best thing about living here.” Check out the October 3 special Home Improvement edition of the Addison Independent for a peak behind the scenes of what it takes to maintain affordable housing (pp. 6C-7C). You can also view the unabridged version below! Your browser does not support viewing this document. Click here to download the document.
Built in the 60s and expanded in the late 80s, Lindale is home to 67 families in Middlebury. About three miles from downtown, the park is an important contributor of workforce housing to the community, but too far to connect to the municipal wastewater system.
Most of the homes in the old part of the park were connected to their original individual wastewater systems, which had not been upgraded in the 60 years since they had been installed. Many were failing and well past the end of their useful lifespan, and some residents even reported sewage backing up into their washing machines and bathtubs. The park is largely built on Addison County clay soils, limiting the potential to repair the systems on site and causing stress to the park's finances as systems needed to be pumped in some cases weekly. The new system is a 20,000 gallon-per-day system that is fully compliant with the state Agency of Natural Resources' Indirect Discharge Program permitting requirements and will safely serve the park for decades to come, ensuring adequate wastewater treatment before it reaches Addison County waterways and our beloved Lake Champlain. The new system also improves and protects clean water within the Middlebury public water system's source protection area. The Lindale Community Septic project began in 2017 with a planning grant application to the Vermont Community Development Program (VCDP). The planning grant led to negotiations with a neighboring landowner to acquire a parcel with capacity to support a new system. In 2021, AHW refinanced the park with tax-exempt financing from VHFA, allowing AHW to close on the parcel and begin design development work with pre-development loans from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. Local firm Otter Creek Engineering provided the engineering services for the project. Construction funding was secured from many partners in 2022, including Rural Development's Water and Environmental Programs, the ANR Healthy Homes Program, the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, VCDP via the Town of Middlebury, and the EPA via Congressionally Designated Spending thanks to Senator Sanders. Belden Construction was selected via a competitive bid process and the project broke ground in 2023 with homes being hooked up to the new system by Thanksgiving of that year. The second replacement leach field as well as park repaving, final connections, and punch list work was completed in September 2024. Construction costs totaled $3.3 million, with soft costs including refinancing debt to allow for new infrastructure loans adding up to a grand total of over $5 million to complete the project. Having a fall can be a major concern for an older adult because it can lead to potentially serious and long-term health impacts, like broken bones, reduced mobility, hospitalizations, and surgery, which can jeopardize a person's ability to age safely in their own home. That is why falls prevention is an important focus of the SASH program. This year, our Vergennes program sponsored a falls prevention class on-site at Armory Lane through a partnership with AgeWell. A Matter of Balance: Managing Concerns about Falls is led by Elizabeth Arms, a volunteer class leader. She worked in collaboration with AgeWell and AHW's SASH staff to gather together 12 seniors that would benefit from and be interested in the classes. So far, four classes have been held at Armory Lane, and SASH Coordinator Diana Rule-Senzel reports, "People are telling me that the class is great and they are really glad to be taking it."
If AHW is able to procure construction funding for the designs produced by this phase of engineering, the improvements to the park may be completed as soon as 2028. We have currently been selected for an earmark by Senator Sanders for up to $1.2 million of a projected $9MM in construction costs.
Announcing the next installment of our 35th Anniversary Featurette series, an interview with founding board member Cheryl Mitchell! The theme of our 35th anniversary is “Growing Community” and since you can’t have growth without roots, in this piece we decided to go all the way back to the beginning to find ours. We reached out to one of our founding board members, Cheryl Mitchell, to learn more about what inspired a group of community leaders to come together in 1989 to found our organization. For her, the spark grew out of parents who always made sure that “friends, neighbors, and total strangers got what they needed,” followed by a career at the Parent Child Center bearing witness to the power of housing to strengthen families. Read on for the full story and browse the full series here. Your browser does not support viewing this document. Click here to download the document.
With assistance from staff of AHW and AHW board members, Maggie and Violet embarked enthusiastically on this project and completed a survey of townspeople in Cornwall to determine the attitudes and concerns people have about the "housing crisis." Overwhelming numbers of people are concerned and want to see affordable housing in the town to increase the number of young families able to settle in Cornwall, for seniors to remain living in town, for recreational opportunities to be developed, and for small business interests to thrive.
Together with a city planning consultant, Jean Eisberg, the interns worked on a report to the Town of Cornwall (applicable to many other towns here in VT without water and sewer infrastructure) to address barriers and obstacles to development of housing and other structures, such as a town store. An engineering firm was hired to do a quick review from state maps of the soils within the town center, and projections were made about the types of wastewater systems that could be planned, funded and constructed to support various configurations of housing for lower to moderate income households for rental and owner-occupied housing. The report does not delve into specific sites but supports further research and study by the Cornwall Planning Commission and the Cornwall Selectboard. The full report will be available after September 30. The Middlebury College interns reached out to planners, advocates, professionals and community members in several VT towns asking them to provide information on their efforts to develop wastewater capacity, including the example of AHW's recent construction of a new treatment system at the Lindale Mobile Home Park in Middlebury. These case studies the interns created reflect a variety of reasons for, and results of, wastewater system development. Case studies such as these can provide a basis for discussion, learning and imaginative planning for towns across our region, not just Cornwall. It is a good time for AHW to review with the ACRPC and its member towns the opportunities for developing affordable housing in our county. We thank our interns, Maggie and Violet, for their excellent work and wish them well in their studies this coming year! This piece was written by Anna Burns, Addison Housing Works Board Member. Thank you Anna for volunteering to lead this project! AHW's August Board meeting will be held on Thursday, August 29, at 4:30 pm in Vergennes and by Zoom. Please use the form below to RSVP and receive the meeting materials. The agenda is available to download by clicking here. |
AuthorAddison Housing Works staff members share news and information about upcoming events. Archives
October 2024
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