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Date: 8/12/2021
CHESTER – The Hamilton Memorial Library in Chester Commons on 195 Route 20 is currently closed due to the presence of mold spores.
Library Director Angelique Toroni said a couple of weeks ago the air quality in the library was poor, and she had been getting migraines. She explained there was cigarette smoke seeping in from the tenants upstairs through a crawl space they shared, and it was really hot, so she made the call to close the library for the day.
When she went into the supply closet to get something, she lifted the table and found mold covering the underside of it. Toroni said she had to use her inhaler after going into the room, and she told the assistant to leave.
Library Trustee Chairman Terry Donovan said they hired a professional company to test for mold spores after the Hilltown Community Development Corp. (HCDC), which bought the 100-year-old building during COVID-19, had cleaned up the supply closet. The report came back as positive.
Toroni and Donovan reported the finding to the town selectmen at their meeting on Aug. 2.
“Remediation is necessary in the library and in the library closet, and the contamination found could be unhealthy,” Donovan said, adding that all of the items in the library and in the library closet, where the Internet connection, phone and wiring are housed, are contaminated.
Donovan said she sent a formal letter of complaint to the Hilltown CDC Executive Director Dave Christopolis to inform him of the results of the testing.
“We do have a trustee meeting [scheduled] to brainstorm what steps are going to be. I feel if we’re going to do remediation there, I don’t think the library should be held responsible,” she said.
Donovan also said the trustees are looking to rent a temporary space to house Toroni and all the new books that have been ordered. She said they will be cleaning up and boxing books, and may take up the old rug in the library, depending on what the cleaning company requires.
“We will move Angelique Toroni temporarily. I’m pretty sure [the cleanup] will take a couple of weeks,” she said.
HCDC bought the former high school during the pandemic to preserve the 15 affordable housing units in the building. The library has a 99-year lease on the building for $1.
Christopolis said HCDC will get the mold out, but the library will have to manage the space in the future. He said he will be meeting with them to see if they have air and temperature control.
“It’s been raining every day. When we bought the building, we did a bunch of work to the roof, which we patched,” he said.
Christopolis said the agency’s goal is to renovate the building, and to retain it as subsidized housing. There are 15 state-subsidized units, and in order to remain housed, someone has to manage the subsidies and the properties.
“The subsidies also expire, and we’re going to preserve those subsidies for multiple decades for another round. That was our primary motivator. We don’t have that many apartments with subsidies, and people with low income don’t have that many options. This would guarantee 15 units in Chester,” he said.
Christopolis said the building was in disrepair after many years of neglect. HCDC can apply for state money for affordable housing for rehabilitation, but can’t do the work until it has raised all of the funding.
HCDC has applied for financing from the state Department of Housing and Community Development, and has also applied to the Federal Home Loan bank and for historic tax credits.
“When you do these projects, you have to raise multiple funds in order to do the rehab. This is a multi-million-dollar rehab. If we’re successful this round, construction work should begin next summer. We will replace the roof and the heating systems,” he said.
Christopolis said the library is a tenant, but HCDC doesn’t charge it rent.
“We have some responsibility as a landlord to take care of the exterior of the building. Right now, they have their own heating system. We don’t know if we’ll share, or how we’ll deal with it,” he said.
In the meantime, Christopolis said HCDC would remediate the mold.
“I’m assuming it’s from all the wet weather. We’ll get the mold out of there, then we need to get together on tenant-landlord responsibilities,” he said, adding, “I can’t imagine this hasn’t been a problem before.”
Donovan said while the library is in what she called a “cute” space, there are some negative aspects, too, such as the rest room which is through two doors down the hall.
She said the trustees have been looking for a new space, and have applied for a competitive state building grant available for communities of less than 2,000 residents. She said four other towns have applied for the one grant, and the decision won’t be made until the fall of 2022.
For that project, they would have to find a piece of property to build on. Donovan said they are looking anyway, grant or not.
“The mold kicked us along a little more,” she said, adding, “There are a lot of balls in the air at this point in time.”
Meanwhile, Donovan said the library is looking at possibly using space in the Town Hall when the Chester Theatre finishes rehearsing there for the season – “if we don’t have the [library] space ready by then,” she said.