After over a year of work, the Duncansville Community Center renovation project is nearing completion, with extensive upgrades both inside and outside the Fourth Avenue building.

Borough Manager/Police Chief Rodney Estep announced that Ventura Construction Services Inc. had submitted the winning bid to complete a full repave of the Community Center parking lot for about $96,000 during a Borough Council meeting Monday night.

The parking lot paving will be accompanied by a redone 35-foot section of adjacent sidewalk to be completed by borough road crew employees, Estep said.

According to estimates from Ventura, work should begin by the end of the month, and will take one to two weeks to complete.

The parking lot sustained moderate surface damage during an effort to reroute the sanitary sewer connection to the building. The work was done in summer 2024 during the first phase of the project that saw the borough office and police department move from the previous Municipal Building on Third Avenue, which has now been sold to finance the project.

With the redone parking lot, the only large remaining item on the project checklist is the installation of new siding along the outside four walls of the Community Center, Estep said.

Estep did not have a timeline for when the siding work would be complete, or what source of funding would be utilized in order to support the project.

On the interior of the building, work to install new ceiling tiles, new lighting, a new storage/IT closet and other related upgrades is now complete.

“The building is functioning really well,” Estep said, noting that in the 10 months he has worked in the new space there has not been a single major maintenance issue.

Estep said that the newly renovated building was a far better home for the borough office, and in the past has praised the larger, more modern space dedicated to the police department.

In the previous building, the police department had been constrained to a single room that held the police chief’s desk and holding area for suspects.

The newly constructed police department has separate rooms for evidence collection, suspect detention and the chief’s office.

Borough secretary Jerrica Grance said she is currently planning a “grand opening” event to be held in the building sometime in early October once the paving project is complete.

Members of the public will be able to tour the updated building and fire department, which has undergone about $7,000 in separate renovation projects over the past few years, according to Fire Chief Bill Lloyd.

Mirror Staff Writer Conner Goetz is at 814-946-7535.