Melrose's $100M+ Debt Exclusion Question Heads to City Council for Debate
Brodeur's $94M proposal differs from the $130M recommendation issued by his Public Safety Building Committee. Who will the council side with, and how should voters react this November?
This week, the Melrose City Council begins deliberating on a potential ballot question that will determine the future of the city’s police and fire stations, and which will have major ramifications for taxpayers for the next 30 years. Should the council come to a consensus by October 2nd on what, exactly, should be submitted to voters for approval, the question would then appear on the ballot for the upcoming general election on November 7th. As of today, the language before the council — submitted by Mayor Brodeur earlier this month — would ask voters to allow the city to borrow approximately $94M for the following purposes:
A full gut renovation of the Central Fire Headquarters, on Main Street, plus a “lobby” addition off the back side.
Demolition of the “Melrose Highlands” fire station on Tremont Street, and a full construction of a new, two-story station on that site.
Demolition of the Ripley School building, on Lebanon Street, followed by the creation of a brand-new two-story police headquarters on the lot.
Brodeur’s proposal is a scaled-back version of the one recommended last month by his Melrose Public Safety Building Committee, which also included the demolition of the “East Side” station on East Foster and the construction of a new two-story firehouse on site. That full plan would have carried a price tag of approximately $875 per year for voters, but even under Brodeur’s smaller proposal, the ask is significant: approximately $650 annually per household, per the city’s latest figures. This is in many ways a remarkable turn of events for a city which, just five years ago, didn’t think voters would approve a plan that exceeded $215 per household. Mayor Brodeur, who has in some ways been unfairly maligned for a problem he inherited, deserves credit for using his term in office to try and finally force the city’s taxpayers — and Councilors — to step up and deal with a problem they have ignored for decades. Will it work?
The stakes are high
There is no debating the reality that the city’s public safety buildings have been in dire need of replacement for years. Brodeur’s group is not the first to study the problem, but the proposal on the table represents by far the most consequential effort yet at doing something about it. Prior to the current effort, a separate committee working under Mayor Dolan in 2017 also substantially fleshed out a (smaller) replacement proposal, but their work fizzled when Dolan left the city to take a job elsewhere. That group, which was much more explicitly cost-focused, debated a large array of options but still struggled to come in under their target of $215 per household.
In Brodeur’s time in office, most of his initiatives have not come up against a great deal of pushback from the Council. In many respects, this has been owed to fact that his focus has generally been some combination of a) executing on longer-term, well-understood city priorities; and b) COVID response. The debate over this ballot question — the Council could choose to pass it as-is, or to increase or decrease its scope, or to break it into individual projects — may take a different course. While any ballot question the Council decides on would need to be approved by the mayor personally in order to appear on the ballot, nobody — not the Council, by failing to come to a two-thirds consensus on the language, and not the mayor, by refusing to sign off on the Council’s language — will want to take ownership of the decision to block this from a public vote in November.
What might the council change?
By positioning himself against the full recommendations of his committee, Brodeur is indicating that he either feels a) taxpayers would not support the full $130M override request, or b) it would be financially inappropriate to do so, given the city’s other future funding needs, some of which will require ballot questions of their own. Either way, it has added optionality to the debate — optionality which, for a long time, was expected to come from the Public Safety Building Committee itself. As recently as this April, the committee stated that it was as “working to develop at least two viable options [for the] public to consider.” In the end, this didn’t happen, and the Committee took it a step further by stating that there is no acceptable alternative beyond replacing all four buildings now:
We caution against following any inclination to pursue an approach that is less than what the PSBC needs-based review has revealed is optimal. It may be appealing to entertain a solution that is less than a 4-building, $130M investment, in part because of the perception of cost savings achieved up front. However, there are costs associated with prolonged deferral and inaction. The current state of our public safety buildings are the result of decades of deferred maintenance and underinvestment driven in part by reluctance to comprehensively address facility deficiencies, hygiene and safety concerns, and codes and standards.
- Melrose Public Safety Building Committee, letter dated 14-Aug-2023
This full plan represents the most likely — some might say only — “alternative” outcome which might arise from the Council, which has little incentive to tinker around with the particulars. Both of the city’s Democratic mayoral candidates, Jen Grigoraitis and Sam Hammar, have stated that they prefer this full plan (the Republican candidate, Monica Medeiros, has yet to express a position on this project). Each Councilor — who all, to a person, believe the stations need urgent attention — will have to weigh the costs and benefits of those two primary outcomes, and the relative likelihood of each version getting passed by voters.
What would a victory for the “No” side mean?
Again, it’s remarkable in and of itself that an exclusion of this scale is even being considered in Melrose, and Brodeur was likely emboldened in his ambitions by the city’s comfortable passage of a 2019 override. Much of that debate centered specifically around the need for school funding, but there was another obvious subtext: the city’s voting base was turning over, and new residents migrating from nearby suburbs and looking to put down roots were perhaps more predisposed to see the benefits of a larger tax base. That trend has only continued since then, but police and fire stations are an expensive and unsexy ask, and it’s far from the only dynamic at play here.
Brodeur’s $94M version of the plan is obviously designed to make the “No” outcome less likely. Some who felt that the $130M proposal may have been too dependent on the recommendations of the city’s consultants at Dore + Whittier — who also consulted in 2017 — will likely feel more comfortable voting for this plan, and deferring funding of East Side maintenance to future years. Should the council choose to pass the $130M version and then see it rejected by voters, it would be an ignominious end for the current lot, a number of whom will not be on the ballot themselves. But a rejection of the $94M plan would indicate something different: a fundamental problem with the entire exercise, and a need to scale down ambitions to match the cheaper, bottom-line focus of the city’s legacy voter base.
The next administration would be forced to go into emergency mode on this subject, likely retaining a third round of consultants to develop a new special election ballot question for, ideally, 2024. It would consume an inordinate amount of that administrations’ time and energy; a new committee would form, and those folks would likely find themselves picking through some of the suggestions the 2017 committee weighed, to find some cheaper plan to send back to voters.
The cheapest possible alternative option would likely entail renovating Central Fire to be Police HQ — an idea fleshed out by the 2017 group — and building a new Highlands station to serve as Fire HQ. Even this plan would cost around $56-$60M, not counting whatever operating funds the city would need to spend to shore up the East Side station (many in the city undoubtedly hope that by the time that building is about to fall down, the legislature will have established a program to make state funding available for fire stations). One obvious potential benefit of this plan is that the police headquarters stays centrally located. The obvious catch is that the city would lose a fire station, an idea the 2023 committee considered a nonstarter because it would reduce response times in parts of the city (to say nothing of the space constraints it would impose on the fire department, which operates much larger and more complex equipment than the police department).
Are there alternative locations for the police station?
It’s possible that a “No” vote would be caused, in part, by voters rejecting the plan’s highly unconventional choice of a police headquarters location. But in terms of building a completely new station somewhere, there aren’t many potential alternatives to Ripley that this particular committee, operating under this deadline, would’ve found feasible. Eminent domain could have been workable in prior years, but there may not be enough years of station life left to pursue this option. Beebe is likely too valuable as a potential school building site. The 2017 committee did explore the option of taking over most of City Hall Parking Lot to build a large addition off the back of Central Fire, which would have created a combined Police/Fire headquarters of sorts. That plan would’ve entailed the loss of around 120-150 public parking spaces, a big-picture land use conversation that many involved in this process were probably happy to avoid.
It’s not clear if, or how, the committee really weighed these options; a location analysis was not published. In their final report they argued that Ripley is the only site in the city which is large enough to accommodate the approximately 28,000 sqft station Dore + Whittier recommended. At face, this is a strange assertion, since the Ripley site is over 90,000 sqft. My guess is that much of the difference is owed, as always, to parking.
The city’s current police station, located centrally in the city, has approximately zero public parking spaces on site, an arrangement which seems to work just fine. But a new facility, built with modern zoning codes in mind, has different assumptions baked in. The city’s zoning ordinances call for a “Community Facility” building to have a minimum of one off-street space for every 400 square feet, so the proposed new station likely assumes a public parking lot with close to 70 spaces. Any downtown station, new or renovated, would be built with very little dedicated parking, which again would probably work just fine.
It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the existence of the Ripley property allowed the design process to be steered towards an outcome where only Ripley could accommodate it. If the city didn’t own it, the final proposal would necessarily fit on a smaller alternate site. While it may be true that public safety patrols will not be negatively affected by the strange location, it’s a major decision in this community to move to a police headquarters which is plainly inaccessible by foot or by public transportation, and hence is simply antithetical to many of the city’s other planning goals. It must be noted that Chief Fallier does support this plan, and hence this location; one hopes that if he felt the Ripley site was ultimately going to be problematic for community policing goals, he would say so.
So what will happen?
I am skeptical that there are eight councilors who will buck Brodeur’s recommendation and put the $130M version of the plan on the ballot, so my guess is that they will pass his proposal as-is while expressing personal support for the larger idea. Ultimately I am forced to conclude that either version of the plan should likely be supported by the average voter, though the approach to the police station is in my opinion highly dubious. There simply isn’t an immediate, compelling, and meaningfully cheaper alternative to consider. I do not want, personally, to spend this money on these very expensive buildings. But had enough people resisted that same urge and approved a replacement project last decade, like it should’ve been, it would now look like a good deal. The city would’ve saved tens of millions of dollars over the lifetime of its bonds, and the projects would be completed, allowing us all to focus on more timely priorities like school funding and climate resiliency. That reality may be the strongest argument against delaying these projects by voting “No” in November: the city has already deferred these projects for cost-saving reasons multiple times, a strategy which has spectacularly backfired. Why would this time be different?
There’s an old planning adage which states that a plan that everyone dislikes for different reasons is a success, while a plan everyone dislikes for the same reason is a failure. So yes, it’s hard to avoid the feeling like we’re just going along with what the city’s consultants recommended. It’s tempting to feel like there’s some better deal to be had here, like there’s some more creative, more Melrose-ish solution waiting to be discovered. Turn the current police station into a new, narrow fire station! Combine emergency dispatch functions, and school administrators, in the Beebe school! Commit to smaller fire trucks and build smaller stations! Defund and eliminate the police department entirely! In the end, perhaps there are enough dislikes, spread across enough different aspects of the plan, to admit that it’s simply the best option we have left, at the 11th hour, and go with it. I have little reason to suspect practical, cheaper alternatives will arise in the next 5-10 years which could make waiting worth it. I could be wrong. If you disagree, I hope you’re very loud about it, and very specific about it, and do so very quickly.