BERNARDSTON — After hearing the results of two feasibility studies, the Fire Station Expansion Committee is postponing choosing a lot for a new fire station until cost estimates are calculated.
At the request of residents, the committee began considering moving the station to a new lot that would accommodate a larger building. To help make a decision, the committee voted in December to have architects at Brattleboro engineering and architecture firm Stevens & Associates conduct feasibility studies on properties at 1 Brattleboro Road and 23 Kringle Drive.
During a Tuesday meeting, Cory Frehsee and Jonathan Saccoccio of Stevens & Associates presented their findings, weighing the pros and cons of each property.
Though the 1.28-acre Brattleboro Road property would cost $175,000 to purchase, significantly less than the 5.62-acre Kringle Drive lot with a $695,000 price tag, the committee considered how design would affect costs.
“Nobody’s going to want to look at a metal building on Route 5,” committee member Scott Digeorge said. “You need to put a different facade on it.”
The architects and committee agreed a building on the Brattleboro Road lot would be built using wood, whereas a Kringle Drive building could be metal as it is removed from the town center’s aesthetic. A metal building would be cheaper to build.
The Brattleboro Road lot is also desirable because it is more centrally-located.
“Architecturally, it’d be a great opportunity to have a very prominent, civic building on (the corner of Routes 5 and 10)” Saccoccio said. “You might be able to look at it as having an investment in your community by having that monument there.”
Plus, the Brattleboro Road lot has an existing septic system the new building could use, whereas the Kringle Drive lot does not.
However, being smaller, the lot also has constraints. It could fit an 8,000-square-foot building with six drive-thru apparatus bays and a parking lot with 23 spaces. Committee members who are also firefighters were concerned it would be difficult to drive a large fire engine out from a station on a street corner, and given a lack of unused land, Frehsee said storm water mitigation would be difficult. The Brattleboro Road plans would also leave little room for later expansion, should equipment and staffing needs grow.
“I think (this design) would take care of us today, but it won’t take care of us tomorrow,” committee member Dennis Shockro said.
“My biggest concern is I don’t want to be buying this building twice in my lifetime,” Digeorge added.
The Kringle Drive lot, though more expensive, would offer expansion possibilities.
“You have the flexibility to put any one of your building schemes down there,” Frehsee said of the Kringle Drive lot. For Tuesday’s meeting, Frehsee and Saccoccio demonstrated what a “bells and whistles” scheme with nearly 9,000 square feet and eight apparatus bays would look like on Kringle Drive.
Being unable to decide on a lot without further financial information, the committee ended the meeting by asking Frehsee and Saccoccio to develop cost estimates that would compare constructing a wooden building on Brattleboro Road to a metal building of the same size on Kringle Drive, factoring in the cost of purchasing each property. The next meeting date has not been determined.