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BERLIN — David Thurber was helping clean up the Vermont Agency of Transportation’s Central Garage in Berlin, days after flooding inundated the facility in July 2023, when he came across a drawer full of photos. The images gave him pause, he recalled in a recent interview. They showed the same location, decades prior, also flooded over.
It was a timely reminder, Thurber said, of something he and other agency leaders had long known to be true: The Central Garage, which has sat on the same site along U.S. Route 302 for the past seven decades, was long overdue to be relocated.
“It was like, no, we can’t keep doing this every five, or even 10, years,” said Thurber, who oversees the facility’s operations. “It would just be crazy.”
The Central Garage is the state’s nexus for outfitting and maintaining its snowplows, road graders, pickup trucks and almost “anything with a tire,” as Joe Flynn, the state secretary of transportation, put it. When the state gets a new plow, for instance, it often comes here first, where workers install key electronics and other finishing touches before sending it out to a regional hub in other parts of the state.
But like so many other pieces of state and local infrastructure in Vermont, the Berlin garage was built on land that’s highly susceptible to flooding. The facility is surrounded by water on two sides: The Stevens Branch of the Winooski River runs along its western edge, while the Pond Brook traces its southern boundary.
In July 2023, both those waterways leapt over their banks and flooded much of the facility with several feet of water, washing away tools, damaging vehicles, leaving offices full of mud and rendering many of the facility’s vehicle bays unusable.
As the old photos Thurber found show, however, that was far from a one-off. Todd Law, the transportation agency’s fleet division director, said his father, who also worked for the agency, remembered flooding at the Central Garage in the 1970s. The site has flooded more than half a dozen times since Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, Seven Days reported last year.
The damage in 2023, however, was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Flynn said in a recent interview, sitting in one of the facility’s few office spaces that wasn’t damaged in 2023.
Now, the transportation agency is in the early stages of building a new, more modern facility on an empty plot of land just over a mile away, still in the town of Berlin. The new garage — which would be far less prone to flooding — is slated to cost around $25 million, an amount the state hopes will be covered, at least in part, with recovery funding provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The project is notable because it is the first major state facility set to be permanently relocated as a result of damage from the flooding in July 2023, according to Doug Farnham, Vermont’s chief recovery officer.
Plans also call for the existing garage facility to be torn down and its land to be turned into open space to help mitigate future flooding. The state has recently been working out the details of that process with the town of Berlin, where some local officials have raised concerns with the state’s plans for the new garage over the past year.
“It’s not going to alleviate all the flooding — but it can help,” Flynn said of the area around the current site. “It just makes sense.”
The agency’s Central Garage is, in fact, a hodgepodge of different garages, sheds and small office buildings, with a large parking lot in between. Five structures on the site took significant damage in July 2023. One, a small shed, was essentially destroyed.
Flynn showed a reporter a photo he took of a dumpster flowing down Route 302 on the back of rushing floodwaters. The dumpster crashed through part of the facility’s fence, toppling it. “That’s how much force was behind it,” he said of the water.
On a given day, there are eight to 10 vehicles at the garage getting annual preventative maintenance, and four or five more in for finishing touches, such as getting the agency’s “VTrans” decals tacked on, according to Law. At times, there can be two dozen or more vehicle chassis parked in the lot outside waiting to be outfitted with new parts.
On a recent morning, crews were doing routine maintenance ahead of the first major snowfall of the season. One snowplow was opened up to get new turbochargers installed; another was lifted into the air while a worker stood underneath, filling its differential fluid. A cruiser for the Department of Motor Vehicles police force was getting its winter tires put on.
After the July 2023 flooding, crews worked for about a month to get the Central Garage back to a state where it could service vehicles. Flynn said he and other agency leaders were impressed by how quickly the facility’s staff, along with other state workers, got it up and running again.
But there was a significant loss: the facility’s largest vehicle maintenance building took too much damage, largely to its electrical systems, for repairs to be cost efficient. The building still sits mostly empty today, except for some equipment that’s in storage.
As a result, the transportation agency has shifted much of its vehicle maintenance into an adjacent building that was previously used for storage, after putting in new ventilation and pumping systems there. That building sits at a higher elevation, so it saw almost no flooding in 2023 beyond some water lapping at its edges.
A smaller building at the rear of the complex — just a stone’s throw from the Stevens Branch — has long housed several maintenance bays, too. It was also inundated with water in July 2023. But its key mechanical systems were elevated after a flood in a previous year, Thurber said, which made it easier to get the building back into service.
Overall, the 2023 flood damage left fewer vehicle bays available for the Central Garage’s staff to work on snowplows and other trucks each day. That’s had a noticeable impact on its operations over the years since, said Andrew Casavant, the transportation agency’s Central Garage regional supervisor.
In a larger building, like the one that’s been unusable since 2023, parts could be easily swapped between two different vehicles that were being worked on at the same time, he said. That building also had a dedicated parts shop for easy access. Now, parts frequently have to be ferried across the facility’s parking lot, he said, which can be time consuming — and potentially dangerous when it’s raining or snowing outside.
Having less space also means the facility’s staff are, sometimes, tripping over one another while working on vehicles, Casavant said. The crew have still been able to get done what they need to in recent years in the leadup to the winter, he said, but preparations have been inching closer to the start of the season than he’d like.
“The job’s still getting done, but it’s just not in the time frame that we would like,” Casavant said. “I’ll be honest. Our output just isn’t what it used to be.”
Plans for a replacement garage facility are already well underway.
In the 2024 legislative session, state lawmakers sent the agency $2 million to purchase a roughly 23-acre parcel off nearby Paine Turnpike for the project. Plans are to build a 53,000 square foot structure with 22 maintenance bays split into two wings, with parts storage in between.
The transportation agency considered about a dozen other sites for the project, according to Law, of the fleet division, including on land the state already owned, such as the nearby Edward F. Knapp State Airport.
Officials chose the site they did partly because it is adjacent to an existing state facility, the Berlin Vermont State Police barracks, on a site that formerly housed the state Department of Libraries, Flynn said. The state had considered buying the land that’s now slated for the central garage facility to be used as the state police barracks in the past, so it was already on his and other officials’ radar, he added.
The site also has access to a local municipal water and sewer system, which was another plus, Flynn said. He called the location “kind of serendipitous.”
The state bought the land later in 2024 from Superior Development Ltd. That company is owned by Wayne Lamberton and Randal LaGue, according to business records available on the Vermont Secretary of State’s website. Lamberton and LaGue have done business with the state before — they built the large rest area just off Interstate 89’s Berlin exit in a partnership with former Gov. Peter Shumlin’s administration.
Lamberton is a close friend of now-Gov. Phil Scott’s and has ties to a construction business Scott previously owned a portion of. Both Lamberton, and Superior Development Ltd., have contributed to some of Scott’s past political campaigns, according to campaign finance records on the secretary of state’s website.
For instance, the company donated $4,000 to Scott’s 2016 gubernatorial campaign and made in-kind contributions totaling $1,000 to Scott’s 2018 campaign, records show.
Law said in an email that the agency’s decision to buy the new parcel had nothing to do with Scott’s relationship with those developers, and was instead entirely due to the merits of the site. He also noted, in an interview, that the transportation agency wanted to build the new facility close to the current one to make it easy for its employees to stay in their jobs.
At the local level, however, it hasn’t been an entirely smooth ride for the state’s plans.
Last year, according to reporting from the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, Flynn got a stiff reception to the plans from the Berlin Selectboard. That’s because the new garage would be built in the area Berlin wants to build a new, walkable town center, the paper reported, and some board members worried the garage project would be out-of-line with that vision.
But at a subsequent meeting, the board members softened their tone on the project and said they wouldn’t stand in the way of it, the Times Argus also reported.
Vince Conti, the Berlin town administrator, said last week that the town and the state have largely come to an understanding related to both the current and new garage sites. The plan is now to install a sidewalk along the new garage parcel, he said, paid for by the state as well as a federal grant the town already has access to.
Meanwhile, the town and state have drawn up an agreement saying the current garage site will be cleared for open space once the agency is able to relocate its operations, Conti said. He said the state will pay for soil cleanup work that needs to take place on the site from decades of use before that happens.
“I think there’s mixed feelings about it, probably both on the board and within the town as well,” Conti said. But he added the project was likely to advance, regardless.
Law said in an email he wasn’t aware of any outstanding points of disagreement between the town and state, and noted the town’s purview over the project was limited.
Flynn said he and other state leaders hope that, by turning the Central Garage site into open space, they’ll be creating more “water storage” upstream of downtown Montpelier, which sits several miles west of the facility. He hopes that could help, even in a small way, reduce the impacts of future flooding that’s inevitable in the capital area.
To make that happen, the state is also relying on help from FEMA. The federal agency has a program to pay costs of relocating a structure when analysis determines that is more feasible than rebuilding on the original spot. Flynn hopes FEMA will pay as much as 80% of the project’s cost, though negotiations are still underway.
Law, the fleet director, said he has been meeting with FEMA officials regularly and expects to know how much the federal government will contribute by mid-January. Those efforts come as the state is still reviewing estimates for how much FEMA will pay to help the state repair the 2023 damage to the complex of state offices in downtown Montpelier, according to Farnham, the state’s recovery officer.
The state hopes to break ground on the Central Garage project next year, with completion possible in 2028.
Law said even with details still to be worked out, he’s certain the state won’t be staying at its site on Route 302. He remembered standing with a group of state officials and surveying the post-storm damage in 2023.
“It became very clear, very quickly — for everybody that was down there — that we couldn’t stay where we are,” he said.
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