Changing the station
Town will soon clear land for new public safety complex
By JOSEPH B. NADEAU jnadeau@woonsocketcall.com
CUMBERLAND – Local residents will see work start on the town’s new Public Safety complex in the next few weeks as site clearing work gets underway at 1379 Diamond Hill Road, according to Mayor William Murray.
A bulldozer has already been moved to the 2.5 acre parcel that the town acquired as the site for the long awaited Police and Fire headquarters for a $650,000 purchase price.
The property contains two residential properties and a garage that will be razed as part of the site preparation work, Murray said on Friday.
“This was something that fell out of heaven for us,” Murray said of the property purchase directly across the street from the existing John J. Partington Public Safety Complex near the Garvin Elementary School.
The town has approved $12.5 million in bonding for construction of the new public safety complex but was facing higher than expected cost projections under an initial intent to raze the existing police station and base the police department in temporary quarters during construction of the new facility, according to Murray.
“When we knocked all the figures out, it was about a million-dollar expense and we decided we were not going to spend a million dollars and not get any value from it,” Murray said.
As it turned out, Donald Pasek of Attleboro decided to sell the properties he owned across the street from the Partington complex and a deal was worked out to make that home of the new building.
Murray recommended the purchase with town surplus funding to the Town Council and it was approved under a unanimous vote of the seven member panel.
The change of plans allowed the town’s architect on the project, Kaestle Boos Associates, to come up with a one-story design for the complex that will include space for the town-operated Cumberland Rescue, administrative offices for the fire departments and the police department. It also ended the at times contentious search for a site for the complex which at one point had been proposed for an open space area of the town’s Cumberland Monastery property near Chapel Four Corners.
The original plan for the facility had included the combined police and fire facilities but the rescue space was dropped when a two-story building was envisioned as a replacement of the existing station at Diamond Hill Road and North Garden Street.
As the site work proceeds, Murray and his chief of staff, George Stansfield III, a member of Building Committee running the project, said the town will go out to bid for a general contractor on the new building. A groundbreaking would likely be held in October if all goes well and construction work begin thereafter, according to Murray and Stansfield.
The Public Safety Complex is expected to be completed by the fall of 2018, Murray said, and hopefully that schedule can be met without exceeding the allotted funding.
“I told them we can not exceed the bonding by a nickel,” Murray said of his charge to the Building Committee for construction of the new facility.
As for the design, Murray said he was very happy to see what Kaestle Boos came up with given the firm’s reputation for designing stateof-the-art public safety facilities. Murray said he joined members of the Building Committee in making visits to other Kaestle Boos-designed stations like Bellingham’s new police station and saw how the firm combines police facilities with other public safety features such a community service room and emergency management center.
A former local resident, Paul Dominov, whose mother had worked as a teacher at Garvin for 20 years, is also working on the design of the new headquarters, Murray said.
“I knew Kaestle Boos was the number one choice for us because of what I saw in the other buildings they designed,” Murray said.
The six-member Building Committee, Mark Linden, chair, David Wayne Wagner, Stansfield, Brian McCourt, Police Chief John Desmarais, and Public Works Director Robert Anderson, is expected to hold a groundbreaking ceremony at the site once a general contractor is selected, according to Murray and Stansfield.