COHASSET — In the May 9 town election, voters elected two new select board members and voted against renovating a town property at 135 King St. to serve as a new police station and fire department substation. The new, restructured Select Board weighed its options to address the problems with the police department’s 1962 station while constrained by the May 9 vote in its first meeting after the election.
Police department employees have said that the current station, which has failed state inspections for ten years in a row, has no sprinkler system and is not fully ADA compliant, does not meet the department’s needs. But voters took issue with the projected $28 million cost of the proposed 135 King St. renovation.
Now, the Select Board has to thread the needle between meeting the police department’s needs and keeping the price of a relocation low as inflation, energy and materials costs continue to rise. It also has to consider how to use 135 King St. amid ongoing town hall renovations.
“Even if it gets voted down, the need does not go away,” Chair David Farrag said. “And as we talked about [at] town meeting, whatever iteration comes back in some way, shape or form, it's probably going to be just as expensive.”
New Select Board Member Gregory Watts said that the only way to meet the needs of the police department and fire department, which would have used a fire substation at the renovated 135 King St. station, is to relocate to a new building.
“I'm not in favor of moving on from a project on King Street, but perhaps we take a new look at either the design of the project or the manner in which we present the project to the town,” Watts said.
Dan Tarpey, the clerk of the Public Safety Facilities Committee, which studied and recommended options for the new public safety building, requested at the meeting that the Select Board charge the committee with a specific next option to study, but the Board delayed the decision to a future meeting.
And while Board members advocated for considering a new version of the project based on resident feedback and launching “a heck of a marketing campaign” to fully communicate the benefits of a new station, as Select Board Member Paul Grady put it, Tarpey argued that those methods already proved ineffective.
“In terms of us soliciting information directly from the populace, I can't tell you how many times we've done that. I can't think of a question that hasn’t been asked or answered 10 times,” he said. “I think at some stage of the game we have to realize that there were just a certain group of people in town that do not want to vote for this and we are not going to convince them, at least with the current options.”
Will Ashton, a new Select Board Member, was a member of the Public Safety Facilities Committee, and Grady proposed appointing him as the Select Board Liaison to the Committee. Beyond the discussion, the Board did not take any votes on the appointment, a new charge for the Committee or any other action related to the police station.
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