Blog

Project

Dutchess County Board of Elections – Hyde Park, NY

The Dutchess County Department of Public Works in conjunction with N&N Hyde Park LLC tasked our team with renovating an abandoned, 24,000 square foot former grocery store into a storage and training facility for the Dutchess County Board of Elections. Our team began select demolition and replacement of the roof in April 2022. Working closely with the town, building owners, and design professionals, we completed as much work as possible ahead of the final construction documents to accelerate the project timeline without overstepping the planning board’s approval process. Official approval was granted in August 2022, presenting us with the challenge of completing the rest of the project within a three-month window, with a hard deadline of Election Day. Despite the projected construction timeline of 6–8 months, our team worked around the clock to ensure that on Election Day, Hyde Park would have a facility to store its voting machines come the close of the polls.

Blueprints

The fast-tracked timeline required top-of-the-line collaboration and coordination, both internally within our team and externally with our partners and stakeholders. Consistent, open communication allowed us to efficiently move through our pre-planning process and deploy our construction team as soon as possible. Our experts leveraged their experience in value engineering, enabling us to execute our plans with cost savings strategies to stay within budget. Because the project required extensive exterior work as well as interior renovations, we needed several teams of professionals on site all at once—and stellar coordination to ensure we stayed out of each other’s ways.

Nuts & Bolts

Our team worked days, nights, and weekends to ensure the highest level of quality on the shortest timeline. No day saw less than 40 MHCM workers onsite, all pushing different aspects of the project forward simultaneously. Not all teams are able to work under pressure with such cohesion, but the deep experience of our superb site managers and project leads guided our team through from start to finish.

Completion

After sitting as an abandoned grocery store for over 20 years, the former eyesore now operates as a fully functional storage and training facility for the Dutchess County Board of Elections and was first used by the BOE in the fall of 2022. Half of the facility’s storage space was allocated to new ballot printers, expanding the capabilities of the BOE as the county was previously forced to outsource printing. Despite working with a drastically reduced timeline and multiple stakeholders, our team’s experience in collaborating and pre-planning allowed us to bring this project to the finish line on time and within budget, and give an old eyesore a new purpose.