What gets built, on which site, in what order, over how many budget years.
Most owners with more than one building do not have a single decision in front of them. They have six, and the six are tangled. The garage is too small, the salt shed is failing, the office needs an accessible entrance, and the roof over the meeting room leaks. Each one is affordable alone. All six at once is a bond vote, and nobody can say which comes first without knowing what the others will cost.
Master planning is where that gets sorted out. We take the whole property, not one building: what each structure is doing now, what it could do instead, what the land will hold once you account for septic, water, stormwater, wetlands and turning radius, and how much of the work can be paid for in any one year. Then we put the pieces in an order, price each phase, and say plainly which sequence keeps your options open and which one closes them.
A master plan is a separate engagement with its own fee, and it ends in a document rather than a building. It usually runs three to eight months, driven far more by how often your board meets than by how long the drawing takes. Some plans conclude that you should build one small thing now and nothing else for four years. We would rather reach that conclusion in a report than halfway through construction.
We start with what you actually do, building by building: crew size, equipment dimensions, bay and door clearances, storage, meeting space, public counter, records, and the functions that have quietly spread into whatever room was empty. Then we compare that against the square footage you have. On most properties, at least one building is holding a function that belongs somewhere else, and finding it changes the whole plan.
Before any building form is fixed, we test what the land will take. Septic and well locations, wastewater capacity, stormwater and erosion triggers, wetland setbacks, flood hazard and river corridor, utility routes, driveway and truck geometry, snow storage, and the parcel lines themselves. This is a planning-level screening rather than a survey or an engineered design, and it is usually where the surprises are.
We develop two or three ways the property could work, not one. An option might keep a building and add to it, another might replace it and reuse the shell for storage, another might move the function to a different structure entirely. Each option gets drawn diagrammatically, tested against the site, and compared against your stated goals in writing, so the trade-offs are visible rather than argued.
The first thing you build must not block the second. A new building placed on the only viable septic area, a driveway that consumes the only good access point, or a utility trench routed across the future addition are all permanent and all avoidable. We sequence infrastructure first where the site demands it, and we say which phases can be reordered later and which ones cannot.
Every phase carries an order-of-magnitude construction cost, built from current regional pricing, comparable Vermont work, escalation for the year the phase actually lands, and stated design and construction contingencies. These are early-stage numbers appropriate to planning, not bids and not guarantees. We say what is included, what is an allowance, and what has not been priced at all.
Grant windows are short and the applications ask for things a town does not assemble in six weeks. We map which phase fits which program, what each one requires in hand, and when the window opens: USDA Rural Development, MERP, VCDP, EDA, FEMA, VTrans and library and school capital programs among them. Programs change; we confirm current terms with the agency rather than working from last year's rules.
You end with a written plan, existing-condition and phasing diagrams, presentation boards, and a presentation to your board or the public. For a Vermont town, a bond article has to carry a not-to-exceed figure and a stated purpose on an Australian ballot. The plan is where that number and that sentence come from, and where you can point when somebody at the meeting asks how you arrived at them.
Pre-design feasibility of three sites for a new garage in Thetford. Garage scenarios in Sharon. A pre-design study for the Brandon highway garage, on a two-acre site bounded by wetlands and the railroad, with phasing that keeps the highway crew operating through construction. Pre-design for the Sheffield fire station and Wheelock town hall. A fire station in Woodbury planned and built in phases under USDA Rural Development. Three Glover municipal buildings carried together through the Municipal Energy Resilience Program, plus an ADA program, a salt shed and a town garage in the same town, work that goes back to 2011. Phases two through four of Barton Main Street scoped as one pre-design package rather than three. A master plan for a working Northeast Kingdom farm property, sequencing buildings across one parcel. Before Vermont, statewide facility assessments for the Oregon Employment Department. Both principals co-chair the Glover Planning Commission, which is a different kind of document than this one, and a useful thing to have sat through.
See our projects →Usually comes before
Feasibility & Facility Assessment
Existing conditions, code and accessibility review, and options with order-of-magnitude costs. Sold on its own, and how most bigger jobs start.
Usually comes after
Architectural Design
The full arc, schematic design through construction documents. The anchor service — everything else is upstream or downstream of it.
Next step
Tell us how many buildings you have and how many budget years you are working with. If a grant deadline is what started this conversation, say which program.