Following years of waiting for a new fire station and the tabling of a $23 million municipal complex by the Town of Peterborough that would’ve housed fire and ambulance services, there may be some light at the end of the tunnel.
While a new fire station won’t be built in the next couple of years, it could be completed, with proper planning, by 2026, according to Fire Chief Ed Walker and Town Administrator Nicole MacStay.
Walker, who started as Peterborough’s fire chief in 2014, hopes the final design for a new station will be in place by December 2023 in time for Town Meeting in 2024 and that “if all goes as planned,” bids could happen in the summer of 2024 with construction soon to follow.
The project to build a fire station on Elm Street next to the existing community center in an area known as Evan’s Flats had been in the planning phases under the purview of the Municipal Campus Task Force. Budget Committee members balked earlier this year at the proposed $23 million price tag, and town officials later discovered that the bond for the cost would put the town over its state-mandated debt limit.
In May, Town Meeting approved an amended article for a $1.3 million bond for design and engineering of a new municipal campus and fire station on Elm Street, on the site of a deserted motor pool building.
The reason for not presenting another plan in December of 2022 in time for next year’s Town Meeting, Walker said, comes down to making sure what’s presented to the town lays out in detail all of the necessary costs and needs associated with building a new facility.
“We realized through this last process that people have a hard time with placeholders, with ‘to be determined,’” Walker said, adding that the high cost, on top of poor timing, contributed to the latest proposal’s problems. “Last year we were also in the process of presenting a big project to the taxpayers at a time when they had lost an enormous amount of faith in town government.”
Walker is referring to the $2.3 million the town lost in an online cyber scam last summer. So far, close to $700,000 has been recouped and the town to tapped into its unrestricted fund balance in order to make up for the loss.
“We had lost $2.3 million and then we were asking the taxpayers to bond the most-expensive project the Town of Peterborough has ever undertaken,” Walker said. “It was just not going to work. Our approach now is fact-finding.”
MacStay said the most-recent proposal for a new fire station was also complicated by other capital improvement priorities, including the construction of a $12 million waste treatment facility the town was obligated by the Department of Environmental Services to construct. She also cited the Main Street Bridge project, which received 80 percent of its funding from the state and the remaining 20 percent from the town, as well as the library project. She distinguished all of these projects from the municipal complex project by pointing to the money saved through federal assistance.
“Even though [the library] wasn’t as dire of a situation as the fire station, when you have $5.5 million that has been raised for an $8 million project, of course you jump on that capital project,” she said. “At any point in time, if you build a fire station, it’s going to be expensive. And if you don’t have agreement on what you need and where you want to build, it’s hard to begin planning the process.”
MacStay explained that in 2021 the town had been hoping to receive an infrastructure grant from the American Rescue Plan Act and that the planning and design—which had already been in the works— for the fire station went ahead.
“There was a push to put money in the ARPA bill and we wanted to make sure if those monies became available we were in position to take advantage of them,” she said.
The town chose HKT Architects for the preliminary design and provided a list of priorities. This included a structure that would last 50 to 70 years and that would be as green as possible, MacStay said.
“We wanted to make sure the facility would do what we need it to do,” she said. “We’re not just providing fire and ambulance service for Peterborough, but the to entire Eastern Monadnock Region.”
This includes contract ambulance services with seven towns, paramedic intercept services and a patient interfacility transfer program that serves Monadnock Community Hospital.
“[HKT] did the best they could very quickly,” MacStay said. “I told [HKT] to come with a high number and revise down because we would like to take this plan and try to get grants with it. This was their first pass at it and that’s what everyone saw. At about the same time we learned, unfortunately, that the money that was going to be in the ARPA bill going towards fire stations was removed. That was incredibly disappointing and took the urgency out of it for this year. Now, we want to take the time that we need to go through process to design it out.”
MacStay said the goal now is finding the right design team and finding the funds for a new station.
“These are critical pieces of infrastructure,” she said. “If you don’t have a good fire and EMS station, you can’t provide good response to forest fires, mass-casualty incidents or a pandemic. Not only that, these firefighters deserve better.”
Walker agreed. He said the current fire station on Summer Street is unsuitable for people living and working there.
“On a given day, we have four ambulance crew members plus others doing admin work at the station,” he said, adding that the current facility, aside from having electrical and heating issues, lacks basic safety features. “There’s no way for us to separate the stuff that’s dirty from stuff that’s clean. And there’s no separation between our apparatus floor and the administrative offices. Currently, there’s no way to clean our gear safely. The floor drains run into Contoocook River.”
Walker said that when the fire station moved to its current facility in 1972, the town had one ambulance that did 300 calls and the station was staffed by volunteers.
“Now we have four in-service ambulances with four people 24 hours a day and 70 people on our roster trained,” he said, pointing out that the physical space of the current station also doesn’t meet the demands posed by larger fire trucks and equipment.
The lot where the new complex would be built on Elm Street is already zoned as a municipal property and Walker sees this as a “win-win” for the town because the current facility could be used commercially.
“The process to get to where we are now has been going on for 20 years,” he said. “I would like to go forward and take a first pass at the building we need and then figure out if we can afford the building we need. I don’t want to go into it with the expectation that we’re going to design a building that we know doesn’t meet your needs because it’s what we can afford.”
