WELLS — Some minor tweaks to the plans for the long-anticipated new public safety building in Wells mean that the cost will be within the amount of the bond that voters approved in June 2017.

On May 22, the Board of Selectman authorized Town Manager Jonathan Carter to sign a contract with the town’s construction management team, Landry/French Construction, for a guaranteed maximum price of about $11.26 million. The approval took place just a few weeks prior to the scheduled start of construction, slated to begin next week.

In 2017, residents voted for a $14.25 million bond to fund combining the fire and police departments in a new public safety building behind the existing department buildings at the intersection of U.S. Route 1 and Route 109. A new fire department substation to be located on Route 109 at Meetinghouse Road will also be paid for by the bond.

Initial price projections for the buildings plans would have meant the project would be over budget.

Steel tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are the main reason for the cost being higher than originally anticipated, Carter said.

“We need to get this going,” Select Board Chairman Karl Ekstedt said on May 22, “because who knows (what’s happening with) the price of steel, and that’s a big component of this project.”

Superficial changes such as removing a fire pole, replacing finishes with less costly ones and removing an awning over the entrance trimmed about $700,000 from the cost for the public safety building, Carter said in a telephone interview on Friday.

While the maximum price for the public safety building is about $11.26 million, the cost for the substation is not yet determined. It is currently going through the Planning Board process, Carter said, but will go before the Board of Selectman before it is greenlighted.

The new, 40,000-square-foot building is a long time coming. Town officials have discussed the need to the current police station, built in the 1960s, with a new, more modern facilities for years. 

“We’ve always made due with what we’ve had,” Wells Police Chief Jo-Ann Putnam said at an open house at the Police and Fire stations prior to the 2017 vote. “This has been a long time coming though, it’s very much needed. It’s an unsafe building, at least for operations.” 

In the current Police Station, which will be in use until the new building is finished, the lockers within the changing area are also used to hold evidence; the building has only two restrooms, for both officers and prisoners to use; and the booking room doubles as a probation office. 

The fire station isn’t as crammed as the police station, but it hardly suffices, Fire Chief Wayne Vetre said. “There’s an undeniably shortage of space, and it creates huge inefficiencies. We virtually have no storage, no place to sit down and train formally, it all equates to a file storage issue and a list that goes on and on.”

Construction of the public safety building is slated to begin Monday and be completed in November 2019. Work on the new fire department substation will begin sometime this summer.

Another major construction project in the town, expansion of the Wells Public Library, is near completion. A ribbon cutting ceremony for the  $1million, donor-funded addition to will take place June 16.

— Associate Editor Dina Mendros can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 324, or dmendros@journaltribune.com.