BRUNSWICK

Planning for a new Brunswick police station has rarely included praise for the department’s headquarters in the basement of 28 Federal St.

But town and police department officials found one thing that building has that a proposed station at the corner of Pleasant and Stanwood streets would not: a direct line of sight to Bowdoin College’s Coles Tower.

The 16-story college building is a communication hub for the police department, where microwave signals from Freeport are bounced to the station dispatch center at 28 Federal St., and vice versa.

To keep that same network in place, a 120-foot tower would be required at the new project site, which Town Manager Gary Brown said “is not acceptable” for that neighborhood.

However other similar options exist and will be explored.

Following Tuesday’s meeting of the subcommittee overseeing plans for the proposed police station, Marc Hagan, deputy chief of the Brunswick Police Department, said that finding a solution for the communications challenge is an ongoing process at this point.

One of the other options Brown discussed Tuesday is a network of fiber-optic cables that would travel along two different routes to a central location, possibly the downtown McLellan Building, into which the town offices are set to move in 2014.

That duplication, Brown said, would aim to prevent a loss of communication from an unforeseen interruption in one of the underground cables.

From there, Brown said, the station signal could tap into an existing college communication network. Hagan said a microwave dish like the one used now could also transmit the signal from the McLellan location.

Brown said Tuesday that the town does not have a specific estimate for how much that solution would cost and has put a $100,000 placeholder in the project budget for the purpose of establishing that communication infrastructure.

That potential cost is one of many remaining for the town’s Police Station Building Subcommittee to navigate during the next month.

After paring down an initial construction cost of around $7.2 million to about $5.7 million, cost remains a focal point for that group.

In the latest estimates from project architects Donham & Sweeney, another $211,000 still needs to be shorn from the project to meet the subcommittee’s target project cost of $5.5 million.

At Tuesday’s meeting, subcommittee members heard the latest updates on the project and a timeline that includes completion of a detailed design by May 15 and a full cost estimate by June 5.

Up to that date, project architect Jeff Shaw said, that the subcommittee will be tasked chiefly with making two decisions, one for a type of drive-through sally port that could raise the project cost by an estimated $120,000.

The subcommittee also will weigh in on what type of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system should be used for the building.

Those cost-cutting decisions come after around $1.5 million was shaved from the initial project estimate of $7.2 million that the subcommittee sent back to the drawing board in March.

In response, the project architects cut $1.1 million in one fell swoop, by reducing the building’s size from 26,000 square feet to around 20,000 square feet.

The committee is scheduled to meet next on May 15 at 4 p.m. in the town council chambers at Brunswick Station, 16 Station Ave.

dfishell@timesrecord.com