OBSERVER Photo by Anthony Dolce The Portland Town Board is shown at their meeting this month.

PORTLAND — The Town of Portland Museum has been in need of repairs for some time now, and the Town Board took steps during this month’s meeting to make those repairs come to fruition. Supervisor Rich Lewis and the rest of the board approved a motion that would allow Clark Patterson Lee to do an engineer survey of the building to assess what is needed.

In specific, the biggest area of need is the roof of the Portland Museum. The roof has long been in need of repair, and the CPL engineering study would address that in particular.

CPL’s engineering study on the building would total $2,500, and Lewis said that unless there’s a red flag, it would be $500 to put the roof bids together and $500 for construction supervision. In total, costing around $3,500, with the new roof included in that cost.

“We had talked about the roof and possibly using ARPA money for that,” said Lewis. “The problem we ran into last time was trying to get a quote on the same thing.”

That would be an inspection of the entire museum building, and the board knows something has to be done with the building.

A big focus of the discussion was what the building actually needs, outside of just a roof. It may now need more than just a roof, as the state of the rafters and other parts of the museum building are unknown.

“If they come back and say the building is in rough shape, do we put any money into it?” said Lewis. “Or do we start looking at other options?”

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The board does recognize the quality and uniqueness of the contents of the Portland Museum, and are emphasizing preserving those displays as well as they possibly can, leaving their options at fixing the home it’s in or finding a spot where the things won’t be destroyed.

The motion to approve Clark Patterson Lee’s engineering study on the museum passed unanimously.