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The Westhampton Community Center awaits the community. TOM GOGOLA
The Westhampton Community Center will soon be more than just an empty building with a sign in front of it. TOM GOGOLA
Westhampton Beach residents who have now waited 25 years for a new Southampton Town community center in their village may have experienced a sinking feeling upon learning that the town recently extended the deadline for contractors to enter bids to renovate the building for the long-awaited center.
But the extension was only for two weeks and driven not by a lack of interest in the project but by the sheer volume of interest coming from the contractor community to develop the property at 112 Old Riverhead Road into the Westhampton Community Center.
“We’ve seen a large number of contractors from various trades show interest in the project,” said Nick Jimenez, the capital projects manager with the town. Those contractors, he said, had sent in “a large number of requests for information,” or RFIs, along with requests for an additional onsite bid walk-throughs at the site that will eventually house the community center.
The effort to construct or develop a new community center has moved in fits and starts since the former Westhampton Community Center on Mill Road was condemned in 2015 and subsequently torn down years after it had been abandoned. The lot was sold about two years ago for $401,200, and those proceeds were earmarked for a future center in the town’s capital project budget, according to town documents.
A 2018 plan was then hatched that would have seen a new community center as part of a proposed public-private development of the Hampton Business District at Francis S. Gabreski Airport with Rechler Equity Partners. That plan fell through over cost concerns.
The town went on to buy the building on Old Riverhead Road in 2020 for $4.1 million but didn’t issue a request for proposals to redevelop the building — it once housed a luxury auto dealership and a restaurant — until October of this year, owing in part to COVID-related delays.
The original bid period kicked off on October 19 and was to run through November 29 before it was extended via a Southampton Town Board resolution to December 13.
The building that will eventually house the new community center is approximately 22,000 square feet, with three floors, elevators, a glass rotunda and lots of parking. The building will need a kitchen and other features to fully develop it as a community center focused on serving the area’s aging population, children and others.
A kitchen is a part of the RFP and will support nutrition programs for seniors. The building also will provide space for the local American Legion post and, perhaps, for town offices as a kind of Town Hall satellite.
The project will ultimately see numerous contractors hired to complete various tasks. A state law known as the Wicks Law requires that the town “split the contract into separate prime contracts for each trade,” said Jimenez. Those include general construction, mechanical construction, electrical construction, plumbing and fire suppression.
Wicks Law is invoked for projects or alterations of a public building that eclipse a $500,000 threshold in total anticipated costs and whenever there is heating, plumbing or electrical work to be undertaken, according to various online legal resources dedicated to the New York State construction industry as it relates to public projects.
The bid extension, said Jimenez, will give the contractors “additional time to review our responses to their RFIs and refine their bids accordingly.”
After buying the building for $4.1 million, the town has earmarked an additional $4.3 million to develop the community center, according to its 2024-28 capital budget.
