Swampscott finance board seeks police station update

SWAMPSCOTT – A new police station is scheduled to be discussed at the Board of Selectmen meeting this evening.Finance Committee Chairman Michael McClung said the committee requested the item be added to the agenda in light of the recent vote by the selectmen not to sell the former Temple Israel property.?The Finance Committee discussed the decision not to sell the temple site,” he said. “We want clarification from selectmen on the vote.”Town Moderator Joseph Markarian, who served as chairman of the Police Station Building Committee until he was elected town moderator, said the committee has not met since this spring and it needs direction from the selectmen as to how to proceed.?It was pretty clear the selectmen were hoping to tie funding of a new police station to the sale of the temple and Greenwood Avenue properties (former middle school),” he said. ” ? The selectmen have to do some hard thinking about what they want to do about a police station.”The need for a new police station has been a topic of discussion for more than a decade. The current station was built in 1938 when the population of the town was approximately 10,000 and the department had 17 officers.Police Chief Ronald Madigan has said the existing police station is a public safety nightmare. The holding cells, which are used to house up to 450 prisoners a year, are obsolete, according to the chief, who has said when prisoners are brought into the station they have to be taken through areas open to the public and escorted down two flights of narrow stairs to the cells.He said an officer was out for eight months with an injury he received struggling with a prisoner on the stairs leading to cells. He said another issue with the 5,500-foot aging facility is lack of facilities for female officers, noting that the women’s bathroom is a closet converted into a restroom. The shooting range located in the basement has been sealed off due to lead contamination and it frequently floods during heavy rains.The selectmen voted 4-1 on Oct. 12 not to enter into negotiations with the Hawthorne Partnership, which offered $1.2 million for the former temple, which the town purchased in 2006 for $3.5 million.When the town purchased the former temple, the original plan was to use the property as a police station, but a few years ago the town decided to sell it to a developer for housing in order to get it back on the tax rolls. The Police Station Building Committee recommended building a new police station on the Humphrey Street pumping station.But voters in January rejected a proposal to spend $6.5 million to build a new police station.