ORANGE PARK – The Orange Park Town Hall awning is set to receive its first-ever remodel in 22 years and by next week, the facelift should be complete.

A few years ago, an employee of Orange Park was tasked with pressure-washing the awning and unfortunately, they punctured it with the water, which left a visible blemish on that piece of Town Hall. Now, more than two years later, that mistake is set to be corrected, or rather, replaced.

“So, we had to file an insurance claim several years ago after an employee punctured it while power washing and just took the insurance a long time to process the claim,” Orange Park Town Manager Sarah Campbell said. “That’s why it’s only just now being replaced.”

The insurance claim funded it this year at $58,000 with the town covering a $1,000 deductible.

Installed in 1996, the old and now absent awning had yellowed quite a bit from its original clear color and grown to become brittle. The new piece of awning will be the walkway’s first-ever remodeling since the building was built in the mid-90s. While there were some bold colors to choose from, such as blue, the town opted to go with a translucent color.

“It’s definitely different than what was there but it’s not anything too crazy,” Campbell said.

The new awning will look pretty similar but the material it’s made of, which will be the same type of material used in the original – polycarbonate sheeting – will be updated to fit the standards of today. This means it will have a lot more structural support in the arches to stabilize it.

“The major changes come in the way it’s made,” Campbell said. “For instance, it has to meet a certain level of durability to withstand regulated wind loads.”

While insurance played a major role in the length of time it has taken for this remodel to happen, the arch of the awning affected it as well.

“It took us a long time to find a company that could do it,” Campbell said. “We found a company in Tampa that was able to do it. [The awning] has such a dramatic arch that not a lot of companies could do it. It has to be baked into the proper shape, so we had to find a company that could work with the shape.”

That company is Logsdon and Associates, the Florida representative for Illinois-based manufacturer, Daylighting CPI, from Tampa.