After a little more than a year of work, the Guilford Facilities Task Force is ready to present its final findings and recommendations to the Board of Selectmen (BOS).

Formed in October 2018, the working group of seven volunteer members were charged with taking an expansive view of potential issues, inefficiencies, or opportunities related to the town’s various properties and assets, and will now issue a final report outlining specifics, according to task force chair Gary MacElhiney.

Over the course of its work, the task force already recommended the demolition of one town-owned building—next to the community center, to create more parking—as well as presented the BOS with potential storage issues across a handful of town departments.

The task force worked with departments heads and the BOS, touring every town property, and then bringing BOS members on another tour later on, according to MacElhiney. MacElhiney said town employees went “above and beyond” to cooperate with the task force’s work.

As far as the conclusions the final report will draw, MacElhiney said there were several big-picture issues identified as potential areas of concern or opportunity. The final report further identifies areas where town operations can be made more efficient, and will recommend that some specific departments move their base of operation or infrastructure, MacElhiney said.

The Public Works Department, which operates mostly out of facilities near the train station off of Whitfield Street, is one of the most notable. MacElhiney said that the task force is working to study the feasibility of relocating public works to a specific property downtown, or to locate a more efficient, more central location for the department.

MacElhiney said that would be a “lengthy process,” but that the task force is recommending a building committee be established in order to carry on those studies and that work.

“Any public works reconfiguration or movement is roughly a five-year project,” MacElhiney said. “It’s nothing that’s going to happen very quickly.”

Other recommendations for efficiency includes consolidating the location of certain departments. MacElhiney again declined to get into the details, but named Social Services, the Food Bank, and the Senior Center as three facilities that ideally would be closer physically together.

“Everything is complex in a town with small properties and no sewers and historic districts and so on,” MacElhiney said. “It’s not an easy solution.

The final report will also recommend the sale of certain town properties, though MacElhiney declined to get into specifics, saying that he would rather wait until the BOS has had time to evaluate the specifics.

“I don’t want to get people riled up when it might not be an option—when the selectmen might not want to do that or might decide not to do that,” MacElhiney said. “We’re dealing with real people and real neighborhoods and real concerns.”

MacElhiney said he expected the BOS to hold a public hearing of some kind to reveal the final report, and hoped any interested resident would attend. MacElhiney said he “fully expects” the report, not yet finalized, to be made publicly available after it is received by the BOS.

The task force plans to certify and transmit their final report to the BOS in early February, MacElhiney said, at which point it will be up to the BOS when and how to present it to the public.