By Ryan O'Connor
Staff Writer

The interior of Town Hall in New Boston may soon receive a facelift. Well, at least a partial one.

Article 11 on this year’s warrant requests a capital reseve fund to be established and an appropriation of $60,000 to go toward renovations of Town Hall.

Town Administrator Burton Reynolds said selectmen plan to ask for the same amount each of the next five years, at which time the requested renovations would be made at a projected total cost of $300,000.

The project would not consist of a complete overhaul to the current building, but rather redoing the first floor. Reynolds said any additional renovations to the second floor would cost much more, especially considering an elevator would have to be installed.

“It’s just getting old and tired,” Reynolds said of the first floor. Selectmen considered several options, according to Reynolds, before deciding renovating the current building was the way to go.

“We’ve thought aboout putting up a new building, but that could be a million-dollar project, so obviously $300,000 looks a lot better (to taxpayers) than a million,” he said. “We’ve sprinkled money into it. Obviously it’s an old building, but it has a lot of history to it and it’s certainly usable.”

Still, even though an architect has been hired by the town to help estimate the renovation costs, Reynolds stressed the process is still in its infancy, and the reason it is on the 2006 warrant is because the town is taking an active approach to financing the project.

“This is just in its general formative stages, but basically it is taking the first floor of Town Hall and trying to upgrade it,” said Reynolds. “It’s just trying to make the space more usable and trying to give people a more appropriate-sized space for what they are doing.”

“As we get closer, we will do a better job of refining exactly what we will do and refine the price,” he added.