Swampscott officials cry foul over $142G addition to police station budget

SWAMPSCOTT – The building committee voted unanimously to accept TLT Construction’s $4.87 million bid to build the new police station, but an unexpected $142,000 to mitigate sewage odors at the building site caused further concerns on an already tight budget.”We’re a building committee, not an odor mitigation committee – we never budgeted for it” said committee member Phil Merkle at the committee’s Monday evening meeting. “I think it’s a mistake to shoehorn odor mitigation in at this point to the detriment of the other line items ? For the town to fly by our project and drop a $142,000 or $300,000 bomb – it’s just not cool.”Town officials have considered the new police station a high priority, but voters have expressed skepticism over the costs of the project. Voters approved a $3.35 million debt exclusion to finance the project by a margin of 27 votes this spring, after rejecting a $6 million debt exclusion for the project the year before. Meanwhile, the building itself has been reduced from a 2010 design for a 17,000-square-foot building that cost around $8 million to a 13,000-square-foot, $6.5 million building this summer, according to building committee chair Patrick Jones.Cost concerns continued at the committee’s meeting. Of most concern was the cost to mitigate sewerage smells from the town’s wastewater pumping station, which also is at the site. A report from Camp, Dresser and McKee consulting said similar sites can require up to $300,000 of “odor mitigation” equipment and site work, committee members said.But there was, as Selectman Jill Sullivan said, “a massive misunderstanding” whether the town budget or the $487,000 construction contingency fund in the building budget was supposed to pay for such a problem.Both Selectmen Chair Matt Strauss and Finance Committee Chair Michael McClung said they personally believed that Town Meeting would not approve any more money for the project, so the money had to come from the contingency fund.But that fund was already being eyed for concerns over whether the site needed additional drilling work and required additional supports for the building. Further complicating the discussion, meeting attendees noted that the extent or even existence of a smell was largely subjective.Police Chief Ronald Madigan advocated a “good compromise” posed by Town Administrator Andrew Maylor that would use $142,000 from a $487,000 construction contingency fund to address the worst source of smells at the site. Madigan said that reducing smells was a higher priority than using the full amount of money set aside for furniture at the station, for example, and that future operating budgets could absorb additional costs for reducing smells.Jones said after the meeting that the chief’s opinion gave the committee “confidence” to pay to reduce the smell at the site. But he said that the budget for the station remained tight. He said he expected that the building will begin on schedule before the winter.Cyrus Moulton can be reached at [email protected].