The small Island community of Grand Isle has been trying to find the way to update their older public safety facilities amidst an environment of rapidly rising property tax increases in recent years. The community has been struggling with the cost of land, architectural and engineering services and ever rising construction costs. Wiemann Lamphere has a long-standing relationship with the island communities including staff that were members of the Grand Isle Volunteer Fire Department as well as two current residents in South Hero. Leveraging a strong relationship with these communities and dealing directly with a local developer, Wiemann Lamphere was able to develop a proposal for Grand Isle that would save architectural and engineering fees for the department by developing similar projects with the South Hero location and sharing the development “soft” costs between the two. The buildings are in the final stages of construction documents phase with construction anticipated to begin in November 2016 for and April 2017 for South Hero. This is a prime example of how we choose to work together to bring projects to fruition and to serve our local community.

Creative Sustainable Solutions