WESTBROOK – The Westbrook City Council will be getting its first glimpse soon at what the new public services complex could look like.
But just what the council and the city finally approve will depend on what it winds up costing.
“We know what we want, we just don’t know what we can afford yet,” said City Administrator Jerre Bryant said this week.
The council authorized spending $300,000 of capital improvement bond money in May 2011 to hire Westbrook-based engineering firm Sebago Technics to produce a design for a new complex for the department, to be located at the department’s current home at 371 Saco St.
The facility includes a large corrugated steel building not unlike a Quonset hut that was built in 1969. In May, Department Director Tom Eldridge said the building was in decent shape, but was far too small. The city’s growing fleet of trucks, sanders and other equipment, along with the city’s fleet of school buses, which are parked in the open air on the department’s property, simply have no place to go where they won’t be exposed to the elements.
“What we’ve had, we’ve made the best of,” Eldridge said at the time. “But what we have is inadequate for our needs.”
The new plan, according to a preliminary report produced recently for the city by Sebago Technics, involves construction of five new buildings on the department’s property: a bus barn to garage the school buses; a fleet maintenance garage for repairs and maintenance for the department’s vehicles; a vehicle storage garage; a sand and salt storage building; a warehouse for storing smaller pieces of equipment such as trailers and snowblowers; and a new administrative office building for the department.
But Bryant said the five-building plan is just one of four proposed new complexes. The other three, Bryant said, are essentially pared-down versions of that same plan. The smallest one includes only a bus barn and fleet maintenance building, with a refurbishing of the department’s current building into a newer, larger administration building.
“It’s still a work in progress,” Bryant said of the proposal.
Another sign that the plan is not ready for final approval is its cost. The smallest of the four proposals, Bryant said, would cost $10 million if approved in its initial form. The largest, most expansive complex, Bryant said, would cost $17 million, and Bryant has already said he won’t back anything that pricey.
“There’s no way I’d recommend a project for $17 million,” Bryant said. “It’s too expensive.”
To cut the cost down, Bryant said, he will recommend the council put the project out to bid by area construction companies, but only on what’s called a “design build” basis. That means, Bryant said, that the plan will only be a rough guide for bidders. In addition to soliciting bids, Bryant said, the city will also be open to suggestions by contractors on how the complex could be built more cheaply.
Bryant said the city is open to anything, from cheaper materials to variations on construction methods, to even suggestions of smaller-sized buildings, if that’s what it takes to get the structures the department needs at a price the city can afford.
“There are a lot of trade-offs we’ve got to look at,” Bryant said.
City Councilor John O’Hara, who sits on the city’s building committee and chairs the streets and facilities committee, has also seen the proposals. He described the $17 million proposal as the “Cadillac” option. While he said it was unlikely the public would go for the largest of the proposed complexes, he did not think the city would ultimately go for the smallest, either.
“Probably somewhere in between is where we will land,” he said.
O’Hara acknowledged that while the economy and a tightening city budget will make the new complex “an exceedingly difficult sell” to the public, it nonetheless is “one that is certainly needed in our community.”
O’Hara also said a portion of the new complex may be funded with a bond, and other “creative” options for funding could be available, such as using tax-increment finance money.
Right now, the project is in the hands of the building committee, which is made up of two city councilors, including O’Hara, various city officials and some members of the public. O’Hara said the project will still need to come before the facilities and streets committee, before going to the full City Council.
Regardless of what form the final project will take, or what it will ultimately cost, O’Hara said one thing he wanted to make sure of is that the public gets ample opportunity to make its voice heard throughout the process.
“I don’t want to ramrod this issue through,” O’Hara said.
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