Plans being made for fire station

POLAND – An architectural firm has been hired to study the fire station.

“We are moving ahead with our fire station space study and have chosen the architectural firm to do the work,” said Town Manager Dana Lee. “We decided that we are going to go with Gawron Turgeon of Scarborough, Maine. Their bid price to do the work is little under $25,000, and it should take about 12 to 13 months to do the full study.”

Lee said that the firm will review the building’s HVAC, roof structure, existing spaces and look for code deficiencies.

“We’ve asked them for two plans,” Lee said. “One is a short to midrange plan, which is anything from just fixing up the existing building and meeting codes, maybe change a few spaces around to make better use of them, to get us by for five or 10 years.

“The second part of this study would be looking 15 to 25 years down the road,” he continued. “What would this building need to look like given the growth in the demand for service, growth in the community and the size of fire trucks? One day we also may need to have people sleeping there overnight. So, one plan is a pretty modest plan of rehabbing what we have there and the second plan covers 20 to 25 years from now. What would this building need to look like, and is the next couple of years the time to make those changes and get ourselves ready for the next quarter century?”

Gawron Turgeon will create architectural sketches of the plan and the estimated costs. They will work with a local committee, Lee said.

“We will continue to review and revise the plan and we will hold public meetings and let people know when they are scheduled,” Lee said. “We have scheduled our first meeting with the architectural firm, which is not a public meeting, on November 22, and we’ll know more after that.

“At that meeting we will talk about public hearings to allow townspeople to give general input about the building, taxes and thoughts they have on it,” he continued. “The fire and rescue department has a lot of support in Poland. Many people think the building is brand-new, but it's now 20 years old. That’s not too bad, and it has a lot of life left in it if it had some work put into it, but it hasn’t had much in 20 years. We have to look at what we have now. Is it solid and stable? And if we are going to put money into it at all, is there a way to put a little more into it to position ourselves for the next 10 or 20 years?”