SNOHOMISH — A Snohomish-based construction company is selling Christmas trees this weekend to raise money to help pay for restoration work on the city’s Carnegie Building.
The sale won’t bring in the roughly $2.5 million still needed to return the former library building to its original 1910 condition, but everything helps, said Dan Reynolds, who organized the sale.
He owns Wyser Construction with his wife, Cheryl, and is on the board of directors for the Snohomish Carnegie Foundation. The grassroots group is leading the campaign to restore the off-white building.
The entire project is estimated to cost $3.8 million. The group has already received a federal grant of $1.3 million for seismic retrofitting and other improvements, he said.
“It’s part of our history,” Reynolds said.
Early last century, city residents petitioned the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie for money to build a library. At the time, Snohomish’s library was in a converted home on the site where the Carnegie Building now stands.
The building was expanded in 1968 with much-needed space, but in the process the original entryway was destroyed, according to a 2004 study commissioned by the Carnegie Library Commission.
The plan is to tear down the addition and restore the historic features, Reynolds said.
Getting enough money together has been slow going.
“It’s taken us several years to get to this point,” he said.
So when he saw a potential fundraising opportunity, he jumped.
The opportunity came from a demolition project that Wyser Construction had been hired to do for Puget Sound Energy.
“We do work for PSE up and down the Sound,” he said.
This time PSE needed the company to demolish a defunct Christmas tree farm near Puyallup to make way for a transmission line upgrade in Pierce County.
A PSE worker asked Reynolds if they could do anything with the trees, and he said yes.
“This is a terrific opportunity to donate these trees that were going to be removed anyway. So it’s a win-win,” said Aaron Drake, PSE project manager at the site. “Instead of being turned right into mulch, the trees can be put to good use during the holidays.”
Wyser has trucked about 200 fir trees to Snohomish and will be selling them in the Carnegie Building’s parking lot at 105 Cedar Ave. on Saturday and, if they have any left, on Sunday.
The trees are between five and 12 feet tall.
“We can cut them right there at any height people want,” Reynolds said.
Dan Catchpole: 425-339-3454; dcatchpole@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @dcatchpole.
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