BANGOR, Maine (NEWS CENTER) — The Aviation Readiness Center saw its official opening on Saturday with a ceremony and ribbon cutting that featured a variety of speakers. About 180 soldiers from the Army National Guard Aviation Units are now based inside the center.
Those soldiers will utilize the building for a variety of uses combining many services into one central location.
“…So a solider that is a traditional solider can come in, be serviced by all of those different functions, and then continue on to do his training, without having to search all around. And then because they’re all here they can eat train, get issued stuff from their supply areas, all in one place…” said MAJ Nathan Arnold, Commander C/1-126th Aviation Regiment.
The 14.5 million dollar project began in October of 2012. It finished on August 28th 2015. One of the advances with the new Readiness Center is that it is now an eco-friendly building.
“…Not heating areas that don’t need to be heated, not lighting areas that don’t need to be lighted. You’ll notice as you walk through the building everything is on occupancy sensors. And the water, you know we’ve utilized just about every technology we can to minimize both our use and our carbon footprint…” said COL Dwaine Drummond, the Director of Facilities and Engineering.
Commander Arnold said that from the start it was a fun adventure, working with the design team.
“…They brought us right in from the beginning which was nice and talked about what functions we wanted next to each, so how do we want the office space to flow, how did we want the training spaces to flow, and they were able to take all of that and put it together into one beautiful building…” said MAJ Nathan Arnold, Commander C/1-126th Aviation Regiment.
