Board discusses use of over $100G in contingency funds for Swampscott police station

LYNN – Members of a Swampscott building committee agonized over a tight budget to build a new town police station that has already cost more than $100,000 in unforeseen expenses.”That’s half our contingency fund,” said committee member Greggrey Cohen, referencing the roughly $230,000 the committee set aside for emergency costs.The $6.5 million project broke ground in December on Humphrey Street, on a plot of land that was once an old incinerator and possibly had contamination in the soil.Extensive testing by Boston-based GZA GeoEnvironmental Inc. determined that the ground the station will be built on did not have contaminants, but the testing and subsequent drilling to create a flat surface to build the station on has cost about $70,000, according to Project Manager Sean Burke, of PMA Construction Services.”Right now we’re on budget, but I’m concerned about the amount of contingency funds already used,” Burke told the committee.But committee member Phil Merkle said – and Burke agreed – that studying the site’s soil and preparing the land for construction is the hardest part of the project and, hopefully, everything else will go smoothly.”Getting out of the ground was a lot less horrible than we anticipated,” Merkle said.Merkle was referring to fears before the project began that the soil was contaminated with a substance much more harmful than ash from an incinerator.”That was the big unknown,” said Burke, who said the first steel beam for the station should be erected by late August or early September. “Now that we’re out of the woods, hopefully we’ll be cranking forward.”The important thing to note is that the project is still on budget, said Joe Markarian, the town moderator and former chairman of the Police Station Building Committee.”This is good,” he said after the meeting. “They got in the ground without an extraordinary expense.”Markarian said the rest of the project should go smoothly because constructing the actual 13,000-square-foot building is not expected to create any major issues.”It’s a very simple building,” he said.But in November the committee was hit with an additional $142,000 cost when the town determined that money was necessary to mitigate odor from the new station’s next door neighbor, a wastewater pumping system.And Burke said GZA is charging the town an extra $2,000 a month for travel costs to and from the site. He suggested the committee fight those charges, hopefully without litigation, and find other ways to cut costs on the actual building.”I’m looking for every penny,” he said. “The budget on this is so tight.”Despite worries, committee members maintained confidence that the project will be finished on time and within its budget.”We’re going to bring this thing home for that number,” Merkle said.Markarian, who is no longer on the committee, agreed.”We’ve just got to be careful going forward,” he said.Amber Parcher can be reached at [email protected].