Thursday, June 16, 2016

To Dream The Impossible Dream

Engine 1 is a tight fit at 85 year old Central Station

The first significant progress in fifty years towards constructing a new South Fire Station occurred yesterday with two (5-0) unanimous votes of the DPW/Fire Station Advisory Committee.  Please excuse my Irish/Catholic roots: Thank God!

1)  Request Town Manager assign town staff member OPM for  (Owners Project Manager) for Initial phase fire station feasibility study.

2)  Request Town Manager to assign a town staff member to draft an RFQ (Request For Qualifications) to conduct a fire station feasibility study.

Proposed timeline for completing these two requests is by their next meeting June 30th.

RFQ released by July 29.  Committee will meet August 19th (due date for RFQs)  to review responses and select finalists who they will interview publicly.

 Millions of dollars of equipment stays outdoors at 100 year old DPW facility

Complete selection by September 1st and open price proposals.  Need dollar amounts for Fall Town Meeting by September 30th, combined with schematic design phase for DPW.

The DPW project, like the Jones Library expansion and new $65 million Mega-School, is further along than the Fire Station project, having already completed the initial feasibility study.

One of the main reasons the DPW Fire Station Committee was created is because these two projects have thus far been the red headed bastard stepchild of the four major projects that will exceed $100 million in town money.

The committee is tasked with not only coming up with efficient buildings in the right place that will serve these two departments for the next 50 years, but to also educate the public on their dire need.

I asked Chief Nelson after the meeting if he saw the unanimous votes as real progress?

"It was the long way around the barn, but it is real progress."

AFD Chief Tim Nelson (standing) Assistants Chiefs Linday Stromgren (right) Don McKay (left)

12 comments:

  1. I think the expression is "immertsashem"!

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  2. I'm still trying to see that building in it's initial incarnation, a trolley barn. As trolleys could neither go backwards nor make 3-point turns, there would have had to have been tracks into and out of the building. Trolley collapsed in the Depression -- few houses built until after WWII and your house looks older.

    Hence unless your house was owned by the guy running the trolleys, I can't see how it could be where it is -- and with land as cheap as it was then, why they would want as tight a turn on that end of the barn.

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  3. Ed, perhaps the reason you are having trouble seeing it is you are looking out your window in Maine. You don't live here. Obsess over someplace else.

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  4. Guilford likes to point out there are still tracks inside the building.

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  5. All tax money must go to the school system.
    Don't you know that by now? It's the only way we can fix all the 'Ism's we are plagued with.
    Sheesh!!!

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  6. I imagine you can't see the roof of that building out your window right now, either, A-hole.

    For what it's worth, A-hole, my interest in that building is historical, in terms of curriculum explaining early 20th Century technological miracles to the IPod Generation.
    Hence knowing how they got the trolleys out of the building matters, no matter where I am.

    And like I said before, give me what I want and I'll go away -- but with A-holes like you around, it ain't gonna happen.

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  7. Ed what do you want?

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  8. Dr. "Ed what do you want?"

    If you can't largely figure it out from what appears above, you'll never comprehend it.

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  9. Ed, you do deserve nothing, zilch, nada.

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  10. Oy vey!

    With the Wildwood School(s) project moving forward, after ten years of hard work, the DPW will have someplace to go (Fort River site), which finally opens up the DPW location for the fire station. The dam breaks open...

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  11. Ed, your disgusting language says more about you than you will ever know. Pity.

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