Design released for new police station
Project presently estimated to be $33.5M
LEOMINSTER » The construction of a new police station downtown is one step closer after the committee overseeing the project recently approved the building’s design.
“We’re really excited about it,” Mayor Dean Mazzarella said on Thursday about the release of the drawings of the building’s exterior.
The 40,000 square-foot building will have three floors with the first two floors being completed, but the third floor will be roughed in for future expansion, Mazzarella said.
He said that adding the third floor meant the overall cost of the project, estimated at $32 million, increased by about $1.5 million, but the city wanted to ensure that if the space is needed in the future, it would be available.
For the mayor, one of the most important aspects of the project is that the station will remain downtown.
“The city’s police station has been located downtown for at least 110 years and that was one of the most important parts of the project,” Mazzarella said.
To prepare the site for the station, which will front Central Street and extends to Cross and Lancaster street, two structures on Central were demolished as was the former Lincoln School on Cross.
Interim Police Chief Aaron Kennedy, who sits on the Police Station Building Committee, echoed Mazzarella’s comments on the location.
“The public will have a nice professional police station they can come to,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, who grew up in the neighborhood where the police station will go, added that the new station will bring a lot to neighborhood.
He was very complimentary of the station’s design, which was created by the
Kaestle Boos Associates architectural firm, which has offices in Boston, Foxboro, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
“We haven’t seen the color of the bricks yet, or the glass, but it’s looking pretty good… it’s night and day from where we are now,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said about 90% of the interior of the building has been planned, but there are slight “tweaks” the committee is still working out.
Flood plain
One of the issues the site has is it falls in the 100-year flood plain zone and the design had to address that challenge.
As a result, the structure will be built above the flood plain zone on what Kennedy called stilts.
Mazzarella and Kennedy, while not doubting the site is in the flood zone, said there is no time in the city’s recorded history where that area flooded, even after much of the downtown was flooded in March 1936.
The city appropriated about $3 million for the initial engineering work and demolition. That covered naming the project manager, which is Albany, N.Y.’s CHA Consulting Inc.; the city engineering firm Whitman & Bingham Associates, which handled the surveying of the property and consulting on potential floodplain issues; and the demo
lition company Bourgeois Wrecking & Excavation.
The station will be paid for by the city issuing a bond. Mazza
rella has said in the past he will not ask for a Proposition 2 1/2 debt override to finance its construction.
Once the final details of the project are ironed out, which is expected in the spring, construction bids will go out and that will determine the final cost of the project, Mazzarella said, adding that he expects the building to be completed in 2022.