Belmont faces ‘perplexing’ impass as voters reject new funding for Mill Building conversion for third year in a row

Danielle St. Onge heard the ceiling above her office in the Belmont Mill heaving to the cadence of footsteps, a curious sound for a virtually empty building.

Cloistered in a small office, the only occupied room on the town-owned building’s second floor, St. Onge, the town’s Parks and Recreation director, sits alone during the winter, running a space heater to keep warm. The vision for the mill’s future is far from its current state: aging, cavernous and underutilized.

A few town offices moved into the building several years ago, when municipal leaders first began envisioning the mill as the next town hall following a complete overhaul of police headquarters. Improvements to the top floor made it into a suitable meeting space for the Board of Selectmen, but in the last three years, renovations have lost momentum.

This year, voters declined to allocate new taxpayer funds for the project. Now more than ever, the conversion project is languishing without a clear path forward.

“There’s so much we can do in here, but there’s only so much we can plan for here,” St. Onge said, welcoming town administrator Alicia Jipson into her office on a recent tour of the building.

Almost two centuries have passed since the Gilmanton Village Manufacturing Company built the hydro-powered mill. By the 1970s, it was mostly abandoned, and in 1992, it was nearly consumed by fire. More recently, preservationists saved it from demolition at the turn of the century, and it earned a spot on the New Hampshire State Register of Historic Places in 2015. The town had been preparing it to serve a new purpose.

To date, Belmont has invested almost $700,000 into renovating the building to house town offices. The town upgraded the sprinkler system and installed a new generator and roof. Last year, the elevator was reconditioned.

The Tioga and Penstock rooms on the fourth floor are already in active use, with topographical maps and local art ornamenting the walls. All told, the renovation is estimated to cost $2 million, according to Jipson, a sum that excludes the cost of the elevator and generator, both upgraded using pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act funds.

Voters’ patience with the project and its mounting costs, however, has worn thin.

At town meeting this year, Belmont voters rejected both a citizen petition to offload the property and a measure that would have facilitated remaining renovations to allow the town offices to eventually move to the building.

Jipson said that “kind of perplexing” outcome — the project obtaining neither voters’ full-throated support nor their unanimous opposition — left her “very disappointed.”

“Town hall is a very small space, and we have outgrown this space. We are on top of one another. We have had to make offices out of closets and are close to having to put employees in the dirt basement,” she said. “The best option for it, in my opinion and the majority of the Board of Selectmen, is to make it the future town hall.”

In previous years, the town financed upgrades at the Mill Building by dipping into its Municipal Facilities Capital Reserve Fund, but last year, voters rejected an article that would have added $500,000 that coffer. The same measure failed in 2024, as well.

This year, in an effort to spare other municipal facilities any “hurt,” Jipson said, the town pitched voters on both the facilities fund and a separate, dedicated capital reserve fund for the mill. The warrant article would have raised $300,000 to support “design, construction, engineering and upfitting,” as well as town hall’s eventual move to the building.

“We want to try to get the rest of our town hall moved into that building,” Ruth Mooney, chairman of the Board of the Selectmen, explained at the town’s deliberative session in January. “We just need to finish it. It’s that last hump, so to speak, to get over it.”

When election results came in, it was clear their strategy had fallen short: Once again, the money the town requested for the broader municipal facilities fund, $200,000 this time around, failed to win voters’ approval. They also shot down the possibility of separately funding the mill project through to completion.

The town has some Municipal Facilities funding for “minor rehab” on the Mill Building, according to Jipson, but the project can’t monopolize that pool of money, since it funds every fix not covered by insurance at every town facility.

The town has no contingency plan to move the project forward without taxpayer dollars, Jipson added.

“We’ve made small strides to piecemeal together a renovation,” Jipson said. “On the outside, it looks great. Maybe it’s the public’s perception that the building doesn’t need work.”

On the third floor, where the Lakes Region General Hospital previously leased office space for a family health clinic, missing ceiling tiles and naked door frames call out for attention. The space will someday house the town’s Land Use and Building and Code Enforcement departments; for now, the Belmont Historical Society utilizes it to store documents.

Doctors’ sinks will need to go, but for the most part, the town plans to work with the space, plus or minus a few walls. Their vision is “not the Taj Mahal,” Jipson said.

The space that will become the town administrator and her executive assistant’s office on the second floor, the best preserved level, is stuffed with Christmas decorations and locked to protect the town’s voting machine. A large multi-purpose hall on the same floor, currently used by the American Legion, will, with some cosmetic changes, become the town’s finance wing.

To prepare the ground floor for the town clerk’s office, workers will need to install a vault and create partitions to carve private rooms out of what is now an open space, storage for updated beach signs and free pet food provided by the New Hampshire Humane Society. Part of the floor already houses the general assistance office.

Some necessary upgrades aren’t visible to the naked eye. The building needs a sound barrier between floors, and a new HVAC system for the first three floors will be the costliest expense, Jipson said.

The town is attempting to be frugal, she said. “Every time you don’t see a door, it’s because we repurposed it upstairs.” Even so, residents are refusing to foot the bill for any further upgrades.

Despite withholding additional taxpayer dollars from the renovation, voters also declined to altogether offload the property. A citizen petition filed by former selectman George Condodemetraky, which would have advised town leaders to sell the Mill Building, only garnered the approval of one-third of voters.

At 90 years old, Condodemetraky, a civil engineer by trade, has tracked the building’s protracted conversion and came to his own assessment.

“I evaluate that building as being a factory, never built to become an office,” he said in an interview following the election. “My evaluation of it was that the operation of that building would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate, heat and cool.”

In his view, the town should put to voters the question of whether to turn the Mill Building into town hall at all, just as he opened his suggestion to the public’s approval or, ultimately, disapproval.

“They should make a warrant article, an explicit request of the voters […] That’s what democracy is all about,” he said. “All I know is that when you spend money the way they want to spend, it’s going to cost the taxpayers, and there’s a lot of people who can’t afford it.”

Like a majority of voters, Mooney, chair of the board, failed to see reason in Condodemetraky’s position.

She told residents gathered at the deliberative session, “When I looked at this petition, I said, ‘Well, while we’re at it, do we want to sell the fire department or the police department or whatever?’”

It will be the Board of Selectmen’s responsibility, then, to navigate the absence of new taxpayer funding and shepherd a future town hall transition. The town might consider asking for the support of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation in securing federal funds, but in terms of grant funding, there aren’t many other options, Jipson said.

It will also be the board’s responsibility to decide what to do with the current town hall building if and when the eventual move comes to pass.

“Obviously, we as a board have had a discussion a few years ago that maybe we shouldn’t have tried to do it this way, that we should have just tried to do a bond,” Mooney reflected at the town’s deliberative session. “We are just trying to get ourselves moved into that building […] It’s a shame to let this building sit vacant.”

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