This coming October, the Brunswick Police Department will move to the new, 20,000 square foot station building currently under construction at the corner of Pleasant and Stanwood Streets. It is currently housed in a 4,000 square foot space in the basement of the Town of Brunswick Municipal Building on Federal Street.
According to Brunswick Police Chief Richard Rizzo, the department has been talking about a change for a long time.
“The police department has been in the basement of town hall since the police department was a police department,” he said. “If it’s not the worst police station in the state, it’s one of the worst.”
The construction of the new station—which began in November 2012—is scheduled to be completed in September, and Rizzo said that he hopes to complete the move over by mid-October.
“It should be pretty smooth,” he said.
Rizzo said that the police department will not be hiring any new staff as a result of the expansion.
The land for the new station was purchased in May of 2011 by the Brunswick Development Corporation (BDC), a non-profit quasi-governmental economic development agency, and was then transferred to the town. After the rest of the town hall offices in the building move to the McClellan Building in 2014, which the College traded to the town in exchange for the Longfellow School, the building containing the current station will be transferred to the BDC.
The Town Council first attempted to purchase the land at Pleasant and Stanwood in late 2010, when it approved a bond ordinance to buy the property. Karen Klatt, who was a District 4 town councilor at the time, petitioned against the project and gathered enough signatures to push the matter to a referendum.
Rather than allow the referendum to go through however, the council decided to retract their approval of the ordinance, regroup, and form a larger committee (the Brunswick Police Station Building Committee) to revisit and continue the project. In June 2012, the Town Council again voted to borrow the money needed for the new station, and work began.
The Brunswick Police Station Building Committee is composed of six councilors and five citizens.
“It made for a much better process,” said Rizzo, “and we had more people behind it.”
Rizzo said that, while he is not a voting member of the board, he and Deputy Chief Marc Hagan have been heavily involved in all aspects of the process, and that they had considerable input with the building’s architects.
“The deputy chief and I were basically on the team that designed it,” he said. “But the architects basically spoke to every employee here, to find out what their needs were, and designed a building around that.”
Rizzo said that he thinks the new station will give an even greater sense of security to the Brunswick community.
“When you drive by it will give you a feeling of security,” he said. “That’s what having a nice modern police station is about—sending a sense of security to the public. Right now it doesn’t do that.”
The project is currently about a week behind schedule due to snow over the winter, and is currently under its projected budget of $5.5 million.