CONWAY — With voters being asked to consider an addition to the Public Safety Complex at annual Town Meeting, the Public Buildings Committee gave its first of two presentations at Monday’s Selectboard meeting.

The addition would include individual offices for the Fire, Police and Ambulance departments, along with space for a shower, a laundry room and a conference room. The Public Safety Complex, which used to be the home for highway equipment, currently houses the Fire and Ambulance departments’ equipment in cramped quarters, while the Police Department has a separate office in the Town Offices in the center of town.

“Everyone’s driven past that so many times just thinking, ‘Hmm, I’m glad the state has never condemned that thing,’” said Selectboard Chairman Philip Kantor. “I know there was a time when that was a serious risk we were worried about.”

If built, the public safety departments would move out of the Town Offices and into the new addition, which is the first step of the Public Buildings Committee’s long-range plan. Once the addition is built, the committee wants to target a retrofit of the Town Hall to move the rest of Conway’s staff under one roof, leaving the Town Offices empty and available for future use. 

To fund the project, residents will be asked to approve a transfer of $311,000 left over from the Highway Facility construction account, alongside a transfer of $84,695 from a sale of public land revenue fund. These two appropriations would supplement $390,000 from leftover American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for a total of approximately $786,000, which the town estimates will be enough to complete the project without borrowing money.

While town officials will be presenting the funding articles at Town Meeting without a final project cost, Kantor emphasized the importance of being able to avoid borrowing money for the project.

“The key thing is the no new borrowing,” Kantor said, adding their careful spending of ARPA money will help them with a project as big as this one. “The ARPA money we saved and all those ideas that everybody had to spend it, we held onto with a white-knuckle death grip and now we have it to spend on this.”

The Selectboard lauded Highway Superintendent Ron Sweet and the rest of Highway Facility Committee for its cost-saving efforts on their, with Town Administrator Veronique Blanchard noting the public safety complex addition wouldn’t even be a discussion if they hadn’t come in hundreds of thousands of dollars under budget.

“If the Highway Facility Committee had not done such an amazing job and saved so much money, there’s no way we’d be talking about this project right now,” Blanchard said.

“Not having to borrow town funding is a testament to your guys’ ingenuity and hard work, so again, I appreciate it,” added Selectboard member Chris Waldo.

The building’s tight conditions were the focus of a legislative tour in summer 2022 that brought former State Auditor Suzanne Bump and numerous other legislators to Conway to explore the state of public safety complexes in western Massachusetts. The tour followed a 2021 report compiled by Bump that underscored the “critical need” for infrastructure in this region.

“It’s one thing to read about it in my own report, but seeing it … lets you appreciate the inadequacy,” Bump said in June 2022.

A public forum will be held onsite at the public safety building, 15 Ashfield Road, on May 25 at 6:30 p.m. Voters will consider appropriating money toward the project at Annual Town Meeting on June 3 at 10 a.m.

A slideshow put together by the Public Buildings Committee can be found on the town website or at this link: https://bit.ly/42niEWp.

Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.

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