Wheels turning on police, fire station sales

REVERE – Mayor Thomas Ambrosino, City Councilors and city officials are fine-tuning plans to sell the Pleasant Street police station and two fire stations once three new public safety buildings open this summer.Tentative city plans call for moving police headquarters from the brick building behind City Hall to Revere Beach Parkway in May. Contractors are almost finished with work on the new police station with its foyers, computerized dispatch room and interrogation and prisoner lockup areas.Work is also in the final stages on a fire station next to the new police station and another in North Revere. Fire Chief Eugene Doherty plans to move trucks and crews based in the Walden and Beachmont stations to the new stations.Plans for future use of the old building vary depending on who is proposing ideas.Ambrosino wants to sell the buildings and use money raised from the sales to reduce debt the city has incurred in borrowing money to meet other expenses.Tentative proposals for advertising the buildings to developers rank office space as a priority reuse and conversion to apartment buildings as the lowest priority recommendation.”I recognize that there are other ideas about how best to utilize these assets,” Ambrosino stated in a February letter to councilors.Selling the three stations to developers under state law requires a public bidding and bid review process. Lynn undertook that process two years ago to sell three branch libraries.That acknowledgement was a reference to council proposals to reserve the Pleasant Street station as surplus space for City Hall. Councilors and the mayor have already started discussing plans for City Hall auditorium renovations aimed at providing space for municipal training and technology improvements.Doherty hopes the move to the new stations parallels the purchase of new fire trucks.Doherty wants the city to purchase a pair of fire engines at $450,000 each and a new ladder truck for $800,000. The requests come in the wake of a $19,000 repair bill for Engine 5.The 12-year-old engine’s turbo unit failed while the engine was responding to an emergency call in August. The failure required a major overhaul of the truck’s diesel engine and forced the department to rely on its 18-year-old backup engine.Doherty said the new trucks will replace Engine 5, which will become the reserve engine. Engine 3, built in 1989, also needs to be replaced along with Ladder 1, built in 1990.