Melrose prepares to pitch its biggest-ever capital project: a $120M public safety overhaul
If all goes according to plan, the debt exclusion will feature on this November's ballot
This November, Melrose voters will likely be asked to approve a debt override for the most ambitious capital project in the city’s history: an all-at-once, $120M overhaul of its police and fire buildings. While final designs have not yet been made public, the project is expected to comprise a full renovation of the historic fire HQ at Main Street; significant expansions to the fire stations on Tremont and East Foster; and the construction of a brand-new police headquarters at the site of the former Ripley Elementary School, on the corner of Lebanon and Forest Street in southeast corner of the city.
This proposal, expected to be finalized in June, would essentially triple the footprint of our police and fire stations, from 35,000 sqft to over 96,000 sqft. It represents a dramatic expansion over the previous conceptual options shared in 2022, which maxed out at 67,000 sqft. Coming at a time when construction costs in the Northeast remain historically high, the buildings — projecting out at over $1,200 per square foot — would be some of the most expensive public safety projects ever undertaken in Massachusetts. In the best-case scenario, the new police headquarters would open in summer 2027, with the sequencing of the fire stations likely taking through 2030 to finish.
The city’s ancient, ill-maintained public safety buildings sometimes look like they were pulled out of Candide, or perhaps one of the Saw films. That they need replacing is beyond dispute, and it’s hard to understand how prior residents, administrations, and Boards of Aldermen let the problem get so out of control. Mayor Brodeur, whose successor will be chosen on the same night as this funding vote, has made it clear that this is a take-it-or-leave-it situation. Should the proposal be rejected this November, the next administration could be forced to undergo yet another round of planning, cost estimates, and delays.
I believe the residents of this city are ready to fund new police and fire stations, and I think we’ll pass a vote this fall. But the sticker shock is real, and skepticism remains following the multimillion dollar structural deficit which arose in the school budget last year. While the city has not yet released the estimated cost impacts to households, one can sort of wave in the general direction of the correct answer. If you assume that you’re repaying a $120,000,000 loan at an annual rate of 4%, that works out to a yearly cost around $6.9M. The census lists approximately 12,000 housing units in the city, so the marginal cost per housing unit by that math works out to $570 annually ($47 per month). Again, it’s that’s a crude model, but for comparison, the $5.18M override passed by voters in 2019 carried an estimated $550 annual impact for the average single-family home. This is going to be more than your subscription to NESN 360.
Public safety building renovations are a routine (but vexing) part of municipal capital planning, and one that the city has essentially failed to take seriously for a generation. All the way back in 1996, under Mayor Richard Lyons, the city completed a public safety building study which recommended a combined police and fire headquarters on the corner of Willow & West Foster, a one-acre site which at the time was occupied by a bowling alley. It’s unclear how seriously the recommendations of that report were taken; the land wound up being sold for $1.2M to a group of developers in 2004, and is now occupied by the Station Crossing Condominium building.
This was a time when Melrose’s tax base felt under siege. In 2001, when Robert Dolan became mayor, the city could barely pay its teachers, and it was under a probe by the state’s Inspector General for a scheme in which the Parks Department hastily arranged to accept dirt trucked in from the Big Dig as part of a slapdash bid to expand Mt. Hood Golf Course. In 2004, the city was forced to mothball two of its three fire stations and lay off a number of firefighters in order to balance the department budget.
The public safety building issue was shelved until 2008, when Dolan saw an opening to pursue the ambitious idea of a combined police station and National Guard armory at 120 Main Street, which has been the home of the 182nd Infantry Regiment since 1955. Despite the National Guard’s willingness to listen, the plan was quickly derailed by both the 2008 financial crisis and the complexity of the idea, which would likely have involved myriad state and federal approvals. It’s worth noting here that the Armory building has become decrepit in its own right, and often presents the outward appearance of having been abandoned, though the state did repave its enormous parking lot in 2022.
The city failed to pass a general override at the polls in 2015, and in 2017 Dolan convened a new public safety building committee. That group, operating with the same high-level constraints as would exist today, never really completed the study, and Dolan left the city at the end of 2017 to become town administrator in Lynnfield. That committee recommended reducing the number of operational fire stations from three to two — average response times were projected to increase by around 27 seconds — and moving the police department into the current site of Fire HQ, on Main Street. The current police station would have been converted into (what else?) a parking lot, to make up for the need to store cruisers in City Hall lot.
Mayor Brodeur, who took office in 2019, didn’t really have a leverageable plan to work from, and in the late 2021 convened the current working group (an effort made rather more public in early 2023 after NBC10 showed up to film dead rats in the station). We are very rapidly approaching the end of that process, which will culminate in a choice that has massive financial and operational ramifications for the future of the city. Current and future residents are now left to finance a critical project in a time of rising interest rates and historically high construction costs. The city has passed one debt exclusion in the last 30 years: a $42M decision, in 2003, to build a new middle school after the old one experienced constant and irreparable flooding in the basement and cafeteria.
It’s impossible to place a hard dollar cost on those decades of inaction, which in retrospect does not seem to have been about prioritization but instead about keeping taxes lower. If you re-figure this project at a realistic pre-COVID cost – say, $750 per square foot – and at the lower interest rates which prevailed following the dot-com bust and the 2008 financial crisis, perhaps the city can accomplish all this work for $70M. Taxpayers will now pay almost twice that amount, and future administrations will be under significant constraints for financing other capital projects. This is not a great position to be in, particularly as global warming figures to challenge municipal infrastructure in new and unforeseen ways.
The alternative way of looking at this, which I think you’ll see implied over the coming months, is that prior analyses were simply wrong, and would have resulted in insufficient facilities which would have cost the city more in the long run (the fire department would’ve received a 7% space increase under the 2017 plan; in the 2023 plan, it gets a 136% space increase). The city’s current Capital Improvement Program, passed last year, lists this as a $33M effort — a figure which may as well have been pulled from thin air. The building committee, which is slated to hold two more info sessions this spring, must be asked to vouch for the fact that facilities of this scale are truly necessary in a city of Melrose’s size. The mayor, for his part, needs to be honest with the community (and with police and fire) about how much this debt service will constrain future budgets. What good are gleaming, spacious fire stations if you cannot afford to fully staff a department as a result? Considering the city’s many other public safety needs which will not be addressed through the construction of these facilities, is this the optimal spending allocation?
The Ripley location is a major surprise. I hope to see a location analysis made public. It is by every conceivable measure absolutely marooned from the rest of Melrose. Locating a facility downtown would have been very challenging, and space constraints would have meant sacrificing both parking spaces and police amenities (the Ripley building, for example, will feature an indoor gun range). Given the city’s focus on developing transit-oriented housing sites, it’s baffling to see a police headquarters proposed at a location which has no transit access from Melrose. Impromptu police-community interactions will go down under this plan, and some have suggested that when police stations are less visible in the community, crime goes up. This is just not a community-oriented facility. While the new station will feature rooms that can be used for community events, I’m quite certain that if the police department really had a strong desire to hold such events, they could find space to do that now, elsewhere in the city.
The Committee’s materials state that their goal is to produce “two viable options,” though it’s not clear exactly what that means, since the basic framework (no shared facilities, no reduction in fire stations) has been billed as firm. Will a second potential location for Police HQ be floated? Will a Plan B be developed that simply includes the same stations, but smaller? Will two possible overrides appear on the ballot? There are many questions outstanding, and not much time to address them. Final recommendations are expected to be handed to the City Council in late June or early July, and I believe the Council will be asked to approve the question(s) that will go before the voters in November. Those questions need to be finalized by the end of September, to leave the city enough time to formally get it on the ballot. It’s a historic decision point for the city, and one which will have ramifications for decades to come, regardless of the outcome.