In our meeting last evening, members of the Brattleboro Town Finance Committee introduced, and then tabled until a subsequent meeting, a motion to recommend to the Town administration and the Representative Town Meeting that the Police & Fire Department renovations, modifications, and additions be considered separately on their merits.
Members of the Finance Committee would appreciate public feedback and ideas. We noted that several public informational sessions are scheduled. We hope that clarity on the issue will emerge over the next few weeks.
Clarification
Do you mean discuss them as three projects, instead of one project with three components?
Discussing the Projects Separately
Until now, the Police/Fire project has been one project, bonded and funded as such; full funding through bonding as one project, with a $14.1 million estimated total cost. This was authorized by Representative Town Meeting during the special November RTM session three or four years ago. The ratio of votes in favor vs votes against was roughly 3:1.
This was done during previous Town Manager Barbara Sontag’s tenure. and she explained that the two were combined because of the urgency of the work that needed to be done, and in order to take advantage of low bond interest rates at that time.
As of now, $5,000,000 has already been bonded and borrowed, a percentage of which has been spent on planning, then re-planning, the features of the project. Of course this was made even more complicated when the Selectboard, between Town Managers, decided not to budget the interest rates for the second bond, which meant that construction could not start because there wouldn’t be enough funds for it to be completed.
By introducing the resolution to recommend that the police and fire department renovations be considered separately, the Finance Committee aims not to declare this should be done, but — in my own interpretation — to give everyone in the Town the occasion to consider carefully just how things should be carried out.
So this isn’t exactly an answer to your question, but I think that the needs of the Police and Fire departments ought to be considered separately, though there may be minor areas where they could be considered together, such as if a small police substation or office could be made part of the main Fire Department installation on Elliot Street.
Thanks
That’s the answer I was after.
I like this an an option to present to taxpayers. There is no set-in-cement reason to do all three at once, though there are some claims it is less expensive to do at once.
That may be true, but sometimes one can’t afford to buy all at once to get the discount. Example: I inherited an animation stand. To get it working I needed a good camera, a camera lens, lights, software, etc. About $1000 worth of stuff that I hadn’t planned on or budgeted for.
I would have been able to get some discounts buying things all at once from one source, but didn’t have any of the $1000 set aside for this expense, so I made a list of everything and started getting it all piecemeal. It took longer than I wanted (over a year), but it all came together eventually. Now I have a working animation stand, and the problem of the $1000 is in the past.
It was fun checking things off the list as I went, plus I have a greater appreciation for each component. It would have been fun to have it all at once, but it wasn’t the only way to reach the goal.