Rutland Herald to move out of Wales Street building downtown

By Alan J. Keays, VTDigger

RUTLAND — The Rutland Herald offices are getting ready to leave their longtime home on Wales Street in downtown Rutland.

The newspaper, operating under the corporate name Vermont Community Media, reached an agreement to move in November into a building at 77 Grove St., a couple of blocks from the city’s central business district, about a half mile north of its current location.

Rob Mitchell, the newspaper’s general manager, said Thursday afternoon, July 20, the terms of the lease are still being negotiated.

Mitchell said the newspaper intends to lease a little more than 5,000 square feet in the roughly 40,000-square-foot Grove Street building. The Wales Street building totals more than 23,000 square feet, he said.

“We just don’t need this much space anymore,” Mitchell said. “The operations that we do as a newspaper are far more technology-driven. We just need more of an office space than an industrial space at this point.”

Earlier this year MFK Properties, headed by Rutland developer Mark Foley Jr., purchased the Grove Street property, known locally as the Central Vermont Public Service Corp. building. The utility, now part of Green Mountain Power, leased the Grove Street building for years from a New York property holding company, which had owned it prior to Foley’s purchase.

Foley could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Mitchell family sold the Rutland newspaper along with The Times Argus in Barre last summer. The new owners are Reade Brower, principal owner of Maine Today Media, and Chip Harris, co-founder of Upper Valley Press in New Hampshire, which prints the Herald and The Times Argus.

Terms of the sale of the newspapers were not disclosed.

The Herald building on Wales Street has been listed for sale for some time. A story published in the newspaper in September 2013 about the building going up for sale said the Rutland Herald moved into it in the mid-1930s. The 1927 building had previously been home to a car dealership, according to that same article.

Offices for the newspaper in the sprawling Wales Street building have been consolidated into smaller space over the years. A large section of the building had housed a printing press. However, the newspaper stopped printing in-house in 2005.

Mitchell said Thursday the building on Wales Street remains for sale.

Editor’s note: Alan J. Keays worked for many years as a reporter and editor at the Rutland Herald.

By Alan J. Keays/VTDigger

The Rutland Herald will move into part of this building on Grove Street in Rutland, which previously housed CVPS.