The proposed $23 million cost of the municipal campus project was a cause for concern during the Peterborough Budget Committee meeting Tuesday night.
For that reason, committee chose to delay their votes on whether or not to recommend the town’s warrant articles to a meeting March 15.
“My only concern is the price tag,” said Budget Committee member Rich Clark, who also served on the Municipal Campus Task Force. “It’s too much, it’s just too much.”
The project, to build a fire station on Elm Street, next to the existing community center, has been in the planning phases under the purview of the Municipal Campus Task Force since last June. The price, as laid out by Town Administrator Nicole MacStay and HKT Architects Principal Janet Slemenda, who has been working on this project since the summer of 2021, is $23.34 million.
This price is only an estimate, according to Slemenda, because of market values being heavily skewed due to economic volatility.
“The numbers are sort of all over the place right now,” she said.
This volatility is represented in the overall cost by an escalation figure of $1.4 million, which Slemenda said would increase each year the project continued or is delayed.
Additionally, more work will need to be done to decide on the final design of the fire station, work MacStay said would happen prior to Town Meeting in May. She said that would help create a more-accurate cost for the project, and likely lead to a motion to amend the figure at Town Meeting.
Budget Committee members expressed concerns that they were seeing the project’s figures for the first time and could not be expected to render an opinion without more information.
“I understand the needs of the Fire Department,” said Ron McIntire. “What I do have questions about is the way we’re going about this.”
Committee members specifically asked for more information about the process that the task force and HKT Architects went through to arrive at this point in the project. There were also concerns about the size of the building, which is currently planned for 30,000 square feet, a size committee members said was unnecessarily large.
They also questioned site plan decisions, such as keeping driveways to the station and the community center separate – a design decision that the task force agreed on in January for safety reasons.
Audience members expressed concerns about the cost, as well, with resident Joseph Cox saying the Fire Department was asking for too much.
“Twenty-three million is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s gonna drive me out of town.”
Shane Sigman, another resident, said he was concerned that the design of the fire station was emulating that of a much-larger town.
“Right now it feels like we’re trying to live like a community of 100,000 to 200,000 people,” he said.
Others pointed out that the town has struggled to address the fire station for more than a decade, when studies first pointed to the Elm Street site as the ideal place for a station that could fit the community’s needs.
Since then, as Fire Chief Ed Walker pointed out, the situation at the current fire station has become dire, with massive safety concerns for department personnel and not nearly enough space to store necessary apparatus.
Task force and Planning Board member Sarah Steinberg Heller said it seemed people were only starting to care about the project now that it had an expense attached to it.
“We need to care before the price tag, too,” she said. “I urge you to remember how many committees and boards have kicked this can down the road. This is really important, even if it hurts.”
MacStay pointed out that the price would only continue to go up as time went on, with inflation and market volatility.
“Yes, it’s expensive, there’s no question,” she said. “It’s not going to get any cheaper to build it, either. We do need to get to work.”
The Budget Committee’s decision to delay voting on whether or not to recommend also applies to the town’s other warrant articles, including the town’s proposed operating budget of $13.67 million. This figure is down by 0.3% from last year’s approved budget, and MacStay said it includes increases by 2.8% to health insurance and an estimated increase of 30% for electricity in all departments.
Decreases are coming from lowered expenses in the finance and water enterprise departments, according to MacStay, related to refinanced bonds and expenses that vary from year to year.
“I really appreciate all the work that the departments did; they brought in some incredibly responsible, carefully thought out budgets that required very little changes as we went through this process,” MacStay said.
The Budget Committee will meet on the night of the Select Board’s next scheduled meeting, March 15, at 6 p.m. to finalize its votes on whether to recommend the fire station project and the other warrant articles.