Milton project funding request would bring new public works center to the town
MILTON, Del. – The town of Milton has been selected to potentially receive at least 500,000 dollars as a part of a community project funding request from Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester.
The request would be added to the Federal budget as a line item, one of ten requests from Representative Blunt Rochester’s office.
Milton’s current facility is located on a flood plane, leaving the building with equipment and staff meant to respond to flooding concerns dealing with those issues firsthand, hampering response times and creating issues for workers.
“We’re lacking storage right now and we’re kind of playing musical chairs with our equipment every time we need something because we don’t have we don’t have a big enough space to store everything, So something you don’t move should take you five minutes to load up a lawnmower, you’re taking 15, to 20 minutes instead, ” said maintenance director Daniell O’Donnell.
Representative Blunt Rochester tells 47ABC the project checked all the boxes for what her office looks for in request, saying that the town of Milton deserves better public works capacity.
“Here is the building that we just saw that is expected to help the residents when there’s flooding, And that building actually folks have had flooding all the way up to their knee in that building,” she said.
The new building will be located on higher ground just a few miles away and will feature a dedicated Emergency Management Response office, as well as an increased footprint and capacity for staffing.
Milton Town Manager Kristy Rogers says they are using the project as a way to combine multiple needs, including dedicated space for town council meetings, into one facility.
“We thought about what else we would need, and that means an emergency operations center for when we have those emergency times, so we have a facility outside of the flood zone and one that can house the many different agencies and departments that we need to operate from,” Rogers said adding “right now, our public works facility is not large enough to even hold the materials and equipment that we need currently for the staff that we have, so as the town grows and is slated to double in size in the next 15 years, you know, we need more equipment, we need more materials, we need more staff, which again, drives the need for a larger facility.”
The total cost for the project is over 6 million dollars, with the town hoping to get a matching funding request from Senator Chris Coon’s office to receive up to one million dollars in federal funding.
Once a new facility is constructed, the current location of 210 Front Street will go through planning to enhance the town’s sustainability, ecotourism, and recreation.
