VERGENNES — The chaos sown by the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has created uncertainty for many national, state and local institutions and their plans — a list that includes key financing for the Vergennes Opera House’s All Access Project.

Here’s the background: That long-planned project, estimated at $1.9 million and now scheduled to break ground late this spring, will upgrade public access to the second-story theater in Vergennes City Hall and at the same time establish for the first time true ground-level handicap access to city offices on the first floor.

The centerpiece of those plans is an elevator tower to be built at the end of the alley that runs between city hall’s west side and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

The other major element of the All Access Project is creating full ADA-compliant internal access from the theater’s dressing room to the stage and theater levels, and also from the driveway on the building’s east side to the dressing room. Also included is an ADA-compliant rest room in the dressing room.

What’s the major potential hitch? Its federal funding could be in jeopardy.

In October the volunteer Friends of the Vergennes Opera House (FVOH) organization received official notice through Sen. Bernie Sanders’s office of a Congressionally Directed Funding grant (an earmark in a larger spending bill) of $500,000 for the All Access Project.

The grant comes from the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Fund, and it is the largest single grant the FVOH has received to underwrite the renovations and additions.

The problem is the park service, part of the Department of the Interior, has been hit hard with the unexpected — and according to some legal experts unconstitutional — firings of 1,000 of its personnel by the newly created DOGE.

The very legality of DOGE, created by Presidential Executive Order and led by Trump-appointed South African billionaire Elon Musk without Congressional approval, has come under question. But without opposition from a Congress with a Republican majority, so far that point seems moot.

That situation leaves organizations like FVOH in a difficult position. FVOH President Gerianne Smart said the organization had received some assurances that grant is still good. FVOH had heard the same about a $300,000 award from the Northern Borders Regional Commission, which was also derived from federal funding.

“Both of those teams assured us we were good to go,” Smart said

But that was before the National Park Service firings. After the firings, for example, Smart said she emailed a National Park Service contact about the $500,000 grant and never received a response, not even an automated out-of-the-office reply.

Smart called news of the mass firings “unnerving.” Still, she remains confident the full project will be done in the long run, possibly in separate parts. At the same time, Smart admits she and other FVOH volunteers are concerned.

“It’s been a roller coaster of emotions with all the news that’s come out of D.C. and all the changes and all the unknowns. I’ll say that for sure,” she said. “And it’s a significant amount of funds.”

Regardless, FVOH plans on moving forward to accomplish a mission members consider to be essential, Smart insisted.

“The overarching feeling for the All Access core team is that it’s all systems go,” Smart said. “We have a big project to do, and we’re going to do it. We have a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of private funds that have gone toward this project. We have a lot of state funds, grantors, that are part of this project. And we have two great partners in our architect and our construction management company, which is Naylor and Breen. And they’re all moving forward with what we know we can do.”

In fact, Smart said there was a bid walk-through for the project with prospective contractors two weeks ago, and requests for proposals have gone out.

“Bid packages have been put together, and we’ll be able to see what the true final number will be and get the project done,” Smart said.

MORE SURPRISES?

But those bids could bring more surprises, she acknowledged, due to the 20 to 25% tariffs the Trump administration is considering imposing on our nation’s trade partners, tariffs that most economists say are ill-advised and will hurt American citizens’ pocketbooks and the nation’s economy.

“What we also can’t control are the tariffs that are looming and threatened on some things we might have to procure outside the United States, and they’re significant,” Smart said.

She cited possible increases in the price of construction materials like steel and aluminum as “big unknowns in terms of what it’s going to do to our project budget.”

Those two issues taken together are problematic, Smart said.

“We could not have imagined five years ago when we started this project that we would have to juggle or manage or assess the impact these kind of decisions are having on us. We couldn’t have imaged these decisions would be made at the federal level,” Smart said. “But here we are … I’m not going to lie. It’s an uncomfortable time for all of us that have been working on this project, and have been doing such great work for so many years.”

Thus, FVOH has had to consider alternative approaches, including possibly doing the project in phases if one or more grants don’t come through, or if bids come in too far over good-faith estimates. The work to install the elevator tower and cover the alleyway with new paving bricks (which will be sold with naming rights to raise money), thus provide access to the theater and town office, might run around $1 million, Smart said.

FVOH has already spend $175,000 on designing, engineering and permitting, she said, and as it stands the remainder would cover the rest of the project — assuming no major cost increases or lost grants.

But if necessary, Smart said the two halves of the All Access Project could be done at separate times.

“There’s the alleyway and the elevator. They can’t be separated. They have to happen at the same time. So that’s one (phase). Then there’s the dressing room and dressing room exit ramp. That’s number two,” Smart said. “So you can say from that standpoint there’s a divider. Which goes first? That might be a way we have to go forward. But that doesn’t take away from our commitment to make the project whole and complete it. It may take longer that we had hoped, and it may take a longer fundraising approach.”

Nothing has changed to FVOH’s commitment to the project, and Smart said grantors remain steadfast in their commitment, and sales of paving bricks have been “incredible,” a good indicator that community support “hasn’t skipped a beat.”

The bottom line?

“What we’re doing as a team besides just moving forward is just looking at what phases of the project might be manageable from a financial standpoint if certain funds disappeared from us,” Smart said. “They may happen at the same time They may not happen at the same time. But they’re both going to happen.”