New Mountain Top House nears completion

Reconstruction of Mountain Top House in Dorchester is currently ongoing, with the projected completion date set for the end of March.

The hospitality house was destroyed by fire during a thunderstorm on July 26, 2006. The building and its contents had been fully insured for $239,000.

Jeannie Lowerison, a member of the board of directors which oversees operation of the facility, said Monday that employees of CORCAN, a rehabilitation program of the Correctional Service of Canada which aims to provide employment training and employability skills to offenders in federal correctional institutions, expects to have the 1,650 square foot, two-storey structure completed within the next few weeks. When completed, the facility will once again have a 10 to 14 person capacity.

Then the nuns (from Notre-Dame-du-Sacre-Coeur in Moncton) who run the facility will move back in and itll take about a month probably to get everything back in order (for the visitors), she explained. Were planning to have an official open house around the first of June.

The new building is the same size as the previous one, Lowerison noted, adding that there have been some changes made in the interior layout of the facility.

There are not a lot of changes being made, mostly just in the location of rooms. This time all of the kitchens will be located downstairs. The nuns main kitchen, where they did all of the cooking, was upstairs in the old building, but now everything will be on the first floor. The bedrooms will all be on the second floor in this building, Lowerison said.

Mountain Top House first opened in January 2001, offering persons a place to stay while visiting family members who are incarcerated at either the Dorchester Penitentiary, Westmorland Institute or Shepody Healing Centre. It had operated without incident until last summer when the building was struck by lightning and almost completed destroyed by the fire which quickly engulfed it.

Lowerison said the hospitality house provides a valuable service for offenders and their families.

The cost is $20 per person, per night for food and board and offenders families can only stay for three days at a time. Mountain Top House provides a great service; there are no other facilities like this in the area, she said.

The main objective for construction of the facility has always been to allow offenders and their families the chance to stay in contact with each other, she added.

Sometimes its hard for families to come and visit, and for people farther away, there is the added travel and accommodation costs. This is a traumatic experience for families, especially those who are first-time offenders, so at least there is a place that they can go to in the area to just chill out between the institutions regular visiting hours, Lowerison said.

Families wishing to use the services of Mountain Top must apply well in advance of the dates of a planned visit, she noted.

The first building was funded by the federal government as well as through various local fund-raisers and private contributions. Although the nuns of the Notre-Dame-du-Sacre-Coeur manage the day-to-day operations, a volunteer board of directors oversees that operation, and is continually raising funds to allow it to continue to operate, Lowerison explained.

Weve had a lot of calls from people wanting to know when were going to reopen, and we hope that we will be back in business within the next couple months, she added.