The Melrose Messenger

Public Safety Building Project Update: On Budget and Going Out to Bid

By Ellen Putnam

At the end of July, the City Council heard an update on the first phase of the Public Safety Buildings Project, which involves rebuilding the fire station on Tremont Street and building a new police station on the site of the Beebe School on West Foster Street.

Public Safety Facilities Project Manager Denise Gaffey, architects from Dore + Whittier, and a consultant from Vertex spoke to the City Council about the project. According to this team, the project is currently on budget and construction for the first phase should begin this fall.

The Public Safety Buildings Project, which will ultimately involve renovating or rebuilding all three of the city’s fire stations as well as building a new police station, was authorized by nearly 60% of Melrose voters in November 2023 as a $130 million debt exclusion to fund the project.

This project has been under discussion for decades, with many Melrose residents agreeing that the current buildings - the 7,000-square-foot police station that was originally built in 1903 as a telephone switchboard building; the fire headquarters that dates from 1895; and the fire stations on Tremont Street and East Foster Street that were built in 1929 and 1964, respectively - are inadequate for our city’s current needs.

The project will be completed in three phases: in Phase 1, the police station will be built and Engine 2 (the Tremont Street fire station) will be rebuilt; in Phase 2, Engine 3 (the East Foster Street fire station) will be rebuilt; and in Phase 3, the Central fire headquarters on Main Street will be rebuilt.

Splitting the project into phases will allow fire trucks (“apparatus”) to be run out of the other two fire stations during one building’s construction, without the need for additional swing space. Initial plans would have rebuilt the Central fire station in Phase 2, but the operational needs of the fire department and the shift to a private ambulance service earlier this year have led to the current sequence.

The public safety building project team are close to finalizing the designs for the police station and Engine 2.

Engine 2 will have three apparatus bays and a maintenance bay - a significant increase from the current building’s two apparatus bays. This will allow Engine 2 to serve as swing space during Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the building project.

The maintenance bay will also potentially allow the Melrose Fire Department to fix its own trucks at some point in the future. Chief John White recalled that the fire department last had an in-house mechanic in the 1980s, soon after he started with the department. Since then, he said, “we’ve been at the mercy of whatever mechanics we can find to service our apparatus and whatever they charge and whenever they can get around to fixing them.” While an in-house mechanic isn’t currently in the fire department’s budget, it’s a position the department could consider adding sometime in the future - potentially as a shared position with another city.

The design for Engine 2 adds a number of facilities - a decontamination suite, training facilities, and an easily accessible public restroom - that aren’t in the current building. “These are spaces that they may not have in the facility today,” said architect Don Walter, “but they should have, in order to be a modern operating fire station. It just goes to show how inadequate this current station is.”

Jon Lemieux, the project advisor from Vertex, described the iterative process the project team went through in order to create the designs for Engine 2 and the police station. The size of each building decreased by 12-15% between the original design and the current plans. “We just want to let the community know that we’ve been working hard with the city to be very cost-conscious and make sure we’re providing space that is needed, not space that may be in excess of what’s needed.”

Current estimates have Engine 2 going out to bid among potential contractors at the end of the summer, and construction starting in mid-October and lasting through the spring of 2027. During construction, Engine 2’s two vehicles will be kept at Engine 3 and at the Central fire station.

“We can tell you that there’s incredible interest in the project” among contractors, said Lemieux, “And more interest equals, hopefully, lower bid numbers for the city.”

The police station is about two months behind Engine 2, according to Lemieux, in part due to a longer design process to ensure the building fits into the Beebe neighborhood, which is mostly residential (in contrast to the area around Engine 2, which is a mix of residential and commercial).

“It could be a very similar set of bidders, could be a completely different set of bidders,” said Lemieux, “but regardless we’re experiencing some very similar interest in the project. So we would be looking to bid that project between October and December, and then that project would run roughly from December 2025 through July 2027.”

“We worked hard to create a building that we think is going to fit within that residential district,” Walter said of the police station design. “We did add a pitched roof to try to soften the edge of the building, and the mechanical equipment on top is going to be within a bathtub basically on top of the roof, so it helps to screen it and create some noise attenuation. So we think overall this is going to be a very good neighbor from an aesthetic perspective and it fits quite well within the neighborhood.”

“I commend you all on the aesthetics of the building,” said Ward 6 City Councilor Cal Finocchiaro, “That pitched roof I think is really important for that area. I think it’s a beautiful building. I think it looks like it’s something that we’ve had in the city for a while.”

The pitched roof will add an additional $700,000 to the police station cost. And the cost of remediating asbestos and other hazardous materials in the existing Beebe School building during demolition is also expected to cost more than had previously been estimated.

“Even despite those two things,” said Lemieux, “the current climate in the bid market tells me we probably have a very good chance of getting the cost of the police station back to the original appropriation number.”

The city explored geothermal heating for the police station, but due to large amounts of groundwater found in the test well, said Walter, geothermal is not a viable option for the site. Heating and cooling for the building will be done using heat pumps instead.

“If you had told us we would have found that sort of geothermal result in Melrose, we would have said, ‘no way,’” said Lemieux. “So you just never know what you’re going to find.”

Lemieux also noted that the city has budgeted $2 million for Fixtures, Furnishing and Equipment for the police station - a significantly higher number than for the three fire stations - due to the need to upgrade the radio infrastructure for the department. He hopes that number, too, will ultimately end up lower than budgeted, depending on the solution they settle on for the department’s needs.

The city is also exploring whether the three-way intersection of Maple Street, Vinton Street, and West Foster Street should be rearranged or improved in order to accommodate more traffic in the area that will come with the new police station.

“We do have a traffic consultant as part of the project,” said Gaffey, “and they are looking at ways of improving the geometry on the street, which is kind of haphazard right now.”

The city’s Traffic Commission will look at any changes to the intersection and the flow of traffic, potentially at their next meeting in September. “And we’re trying to narrow the street up,” added Gaffey, “to make it a little bit safer and to reduce the speeding that’s happening.”

While the financial outlook for Engine 3 and Central is less clear, since those projects are further out, the project team is starting to get a sense of those costs, too.

“We are keeping a close eye on Central in the floor slab as it relates structurally to supporting apparatus,” said Walter, “and we are starting to do site survey work and some initial geotechnical work on both the Central and Engine 3 sites.”

“We’re doing really well,” added Lemieux, “We’re over $7 million under cost right now, and right now the city is about to bid a project in what has really been a surprise so far as bidding climate goes. We’ve seen a lot of interest, and there’s no doubt that that kind of ties to some unknowns and insecurity in the private market, so suddenly we have names of folks who want to bid projects who we haven’t seen in a really long time. That’s great for Melrose. That just means more competition, and more competition means better numbers.”

“We’re trending really well right now,” he went on, “but none of us can tell you what it’s going to look like next year or when we bid these other two. Heck, we could be thrown a curveball in the next three months with a tariff that throws the police number off, but as of right now, we’re very comfortable with where we are in the market.”

More information about the Public Safety Buildings Project can be found on the city's website.

Posted August 4th, 2025