April 5, 2006

SHREWSBURY - The Fire Station Building Committee has filed its latest report with the Board of Selectmen. This report details a new proposal to address all of the facility needs of the Fire Department in one proposal.

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February 23, 2006

SHREWSBURY - On Monday, February 27, 2006, at 7:45 PM, the Fire Station Building Committee will make a preliminary report to the Board of Selectmen. This report will update the Board on the progress of the Committee as it works to developed a new fire facilities proposal different from that defeated at the Special Town Election last November.

On February 2, 2006, the Board of Selectmen had last met with the Committee and provided to the Committee the broad outline of the new project. This outline included a new Fire Headquarters at the Town Center, renovation of Station #2 and the construction of a new Fire Station #3 in the CentTech Blvd area. The Committee has submitted to the Board in advance of this meeting a number of materials.

• Memo and Materials
• Presentation Materials
  
  
  

September 28, 2005

The Fire Station Building Committee released their report to Town Meeting Members today. The report deals with a fire facilities project that involves a new Fire Headquarters and renovation of Station Number 2.

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‘Honey I Shrunk the Fire Station’

The original/conceptual size and shape of the new fire headquarters came about through a pensive process. After twenty five years on the job, many changes have come about that require changes in the way we operate. As Chief, I wrote a narrative description of every room in the station, what would be the use/purpose of the room, how many persons would usually populate the room, what furniture would be expected to be in the room. The original estimate of 22,000 feet was a good guess on my part so as to start the program. Following the architect’s interpretation of the narrative for furniture, population, and function, the space was calculate to best fit within 17,000 feet. The 17,000 feet accomplishes all the functions necessary to run the department today and includes room sized sufficient for expansion of services well into the future.

‘A Global Approach’

The Senior Center has successfully been utilized as a multi-purpose building. Using the Senior Center as a model for morphing a facility into what ever needs arise, the same should be true of the new fire headquarters: create an across-the-board public safety building that can convert into a command center from which to operate all public safety departments under one control point.

Many non-fire department functions should have a place within the new headquarters facility. First and foremost are the functions of the Fire Department. Fire suppression, prevention, education, preparedness, planning, execution all are principle functions of the fire department. Approaching all these topics globally, we need to interoperate with the police, medical, and emergency management sections as well. Allowing for better interoperability is not a luxury, in today’s environment it is required when approached from Office of Domestic Preparedness or Department of Homeland Security perspectives.

Building to interoperability standards is accomplished by meeting certain needs of the town with proper configuring of the space provided: better known as multi-tasking. The classroom becomes the Emergency Operations Center. The Fire Prevention room shares space with the Emergency Management Director. The Operations Center doubles as a dispatch center for the police should they become dislocated from their building. The Communications Room holds a back-up system for the entire town’s computer system. None of these usage changes requires more space, just the proper set-up of the original spaces.

Money is always a driving issue. The concept will soon be chosen and budgets will be created. Watch this space for the next installment. We will discuss costs and strategies. My intentio0n is to build headquarters and remodel the Lake Station in the short term. The aerial truck still looms in the future as does the replacement of another truck in 2007. Long term we must broach the issue of the impending population explosion in the southeast quarter of town. There is much to be done.

July 13, 2005

Dear Citizens of the Town of Shrewsbury,

Our new fire headquarters station is nearing the completion of a concept. Here are some of the steps that have been taken toward developing these plans

A plan was laid out by me that included a narrative explaining each room’s expected use which included a list of the furniture and fixtures that would be expected to be placed in the room. I estimated a room size based on these criteria.

A Fire Station Building Committee has been formed, including Town Manager Morgado, Selectman Bruce Card (Chairman), Building Superintendent Robert Cox, Fire Chief Gerald LaFlamme, and citizens at-large Robert Sacco (Asst Chairman), Anthony Mastromatteo, and Ralph LeBlanc. The Building Committee hired Kang Associates Inc of Sudbury as architect.

The architect applied scientific standards to the function, furniture, and population of the rooms and rescaled the project, resulting in a decrease of 2,000 square feet. Since my layouts were best estimates I agree completely with the new sizing. We are now working on the layout of the facility. There are certain rooms that are necessarily placed in certain locations within the building, based on function as well as security issues.

The plans have been discussed and reviewed by the Historical District Commission as well as by the Congregational Church administration and the abutter. We have a consensus with these two neighbors that will produce a win-win scenario with the planned construction. Attention to historical sensitivities and additional parking space in the center area are both breaths of fresh air for the center as a whole. All parties involved in the review appreciate the sensitivity of the district and have been heard and heeded in this process.

The plan of action calls for relocating the Cemetery garage to a point at the northern end of the cemetery. This decision was arrived at in consultation with the Cemetery Commission. The new fire facility will be built behind the current station. Upon completion of the new building, the old facility will be removed, opening up the common area and moving the station and trucks back off the common.

July 21 the Building Committee will meet to discuss and accept the plans.

Sincerely,
Chief LaFlamme

April, 2005

Town Meeting Members,

In 2000 when I was appointed your Fire Chief, amongst other challenges I was tasked with creating a report evaluating the readiness of the department as a whole and outlining the immediate needs of the Fire Department along with a second report strategically laying out the needs of the department for the next ten years.

While there were and still are many priorities, increasing personnel is our first order of business. Our department has grown and we are very thankful for that. We can now begin a reorganization that includes/requires these new positions be filled and a new headquarters be built.

The southeast quadrant of Shrewsbury is under heavy development at this time. The introduction of utilities as well as the location of the train station has made this area desirable for building single-family homes, apartments, senior living areas, and new businesses. Currently there are plans to increase the housing stock in this area by over 1,000 units, with nearly 200 in place already. Fire Department response to this end of town now stands at EIGHT minutes, while the average across the entire town is under FOUR minutes. The barriers along Route Nine make the access difficult at best from the other two stations into this section of town. This will be the last step to round out the strategic plan now in play.

An ad-hoc committee consisting of the Town Manager Morgado, Assistant Town Manager Hale, Building Inspector Alarie, and Superintendent of Public Buildings Cox, The fire chief examined various sites and made the findings available to this committee for further consideration. Site selection included viewing and evaluating more than twelve parcels of land in the area on and about Route 20, Memorial Drive, Cherry Street, Centech Drive, and Grafton Street. Selection criteria included location, size, availability of utilities (and cost to provide), access to the site, line-of-sight issues while exiting the site, wetlands restrictions, potential ledge formations, neighborhood encroachments, and response times as they change from site to site. Some sites were voluntarily offered for our consideration, publicly for sale, town owned, not-for-sale, or conservation-restricted. Included in estimating the overall cost/benefit of a site was the usefulness of the site, asking price for the site, the cost of preparing the site, and the cost of installing utilities to the site where they are not currently available.

As with any project, the dynamics of the sight selection have been quite fluid. Pressed by standards in the fire service, such as NFPA, NIOSH, or OSHA, fire station locations are very point specific. The location of stations is about response time to all the homes in the town. The national standard is set at 4 minutes to respond to 95% of the homes in Shrewsbury. Our current data is presently pegged at 3.89 minutes. Any adjustment of locations required a detailed study of how to improve the timeline, and how not to adversely affect it. The only station that should be moved and affect the response times dramatically is the Edgemere station. However, the Headquarters station needs to be addressed first since we are out of room and the pressure here is greater and more immediate than the pressure along Route 20. Route 20 needs to be moved but the stressors are just now coming into play. The pressure on headquarters has been there for a long time and is increasing with every new truck purchased. The next truck, the platform, will not fit in the current center station. It will have to be housed at the Lake station in the short term.

The location proposed and voted affirmatively by the town meeting members, the former LOMMA Property, was removed from consideration due to what we considered as some contamination issues found during our due diligence on the property prior to consummating the purchase. Also, townspeople are accustomed to one-stop-shopping among municipal services in and around the center of town, and moving the fire offices to Route 20 would break up this harmony.
The new proposed location is directly behind the current fire headquarters on Church Road, on the Common. This site is completely flat, level with the highway, and causes no new neighborhood impositions. The new facility is still anticipated to be made up of four drive-through bays and a two story administrative building with a footprint of 13,000 square feet and total space of 20,000 square feet.

As the most recent step taken to advance the project forward, the Board of Selectmen has appointed a Fire Station Building Committee, consisting of the Town Manager Morgado, Selectman Card, Fire Chief LaFlamme, Buildings Superintendent Cox, and three interested townspersons, Ralph LeBlanc, Anthony Mastromatteo, and Pat Sacco.

As always, I wish to thank you for your ongoing support of our fire department. I respectfully request that you continue the support we have come to know from our townspeople and town meeting members.

Respectfully yours in public safety,
Gerald F LaFlamme, Fire Chief

May, 2004

Town Meeting Members,

In 2000 when I was appointed your Fire Chief, amongst other challenges I was tasked with creating a report evaluating the readiness of the department as a whole and outlining the immediate needs of the Fire Department along with a second report strategically laying out the needs of the department for the next ten years.

The ready report listed five tasks to be completed:

1. Repair current equipment to near-perfect conditions
2. Purchase state-of-the-art equipment to meet newest needs of the department
3. Replace Engine Four with a state-of-the-art rescue/pumper and replace the 40 year-old ladder truck with a state-of-the-art platform truck
4. Add eight new members to the fire department that will allow the creation of working foremen and increase the supervisory capability within the department
5. Build a new fire headquarters

I am pleased to report that we are well through the list of immediate needs for the department. Out trucks are in excellent condition. State grants have helped considerably in purchasing new technologies to meet new demands never experienced before, such as responding to recent issues concerning anthrax, SARS, smallpox, and other ‘terror-related issues’ that we all find creeping into our vocabulary recently. The new Rescue truck is in service and firefighters and townspeople alike have raved at its prowess. While there were many priorities, increasing personnel is our first order of business. Our department has grown and we are very thankful for that. We can now begin a reorganization that includes/requires these new positions be filled and a new headquarters be built.

The new building will be a headquarters facility that will relocate the Edgemere station 1.6 miles east of its present location. Church Road and Harrington Avenue stations will remain in the inventory, as they are both strategically important to overall protection of the town.

The southeast quadrant of Shrewsbury is under heavy development at this time. The introduction of utilities as well as the location of the train station has made this area desirable for building single-family homes, apartments, senior living areas, and new businesses. Currently there are plans to increase the housing stock in this area by over 500 units, with nearly 200 in place already. Fire Department response to this end of town now stands at EIGHT minutes, while the average across the entire town is under FOUR minutes. The barriers along Route Nine make the access difficult at best from the other two stations into this section of town.

An ad-hoc committee consisting of the Town Manager Morgado, Assistant Town Manager Hale, Building Inspector Alarie, and Superintendent of Public Buildings Cox, The fire chief examined various sites and made the findings available to this committee for further consideration. Site selection included viewing and evaluating twelve parcels of land in the area on and about Route 20, Memorial Drive, Cherry Street, Centech Drive, and Grafton Street. Selection criteria included location, size, availability of utilities (and cost to provide), access to the site, line-of-sight issues while exiting the site, wetlands restrictions, potential ledge formations, neighborhood encroachments, and response times as they change from site to site. Some sites were voluntarily offered for our consideration, publicly for sale, town owned, not-for-sale, or conservation-restricted. Included in estimating the overall cost/benefit of a site was the usefulness of the site, asking price for the site, the cost of preparing the site, and the cost of installing utilities to the site where they are not currently available. (Another consideration was if we wanted to install utilities to a given site and thereby create more expansion and or building around the site caused by the availability of the very utilities the Town of Shrewsbury would pay to install.)

The proposed location at 476 Hartford Turnpike (Lomma Transport) bisects Route Twenty in the center and allows for under-four-minute response along all of the Route 20 area. The chosen location is the only one that has a good line-of-site exiting the property. This is the only site amongst those studied that is accessible to all the required utilities for a fire station. Other sites reviewed lack necessary utilities, are too small, are circled in wetlands, have ledge issues, or are conservation protected. This site is completely flat, level with the highway, and suffers none of these detriments. There is ample room for parking for public usage as a polling location or for public meetings. There will be a portion of the property set aside for future expansion as well as a dedicated training area.

The new facility is anticipated to be made up of four drive-through bays and a two story administrative building with a footprint of 13,000 square feet and total space of 20,000 square feet, covering 10% of the land. There will be parking primarily along the west side of the building. The paved area will be lit with streetlight-type lighting shielded away from the property lines. With the Town of Shrewsbury as the landlord neighbors can be assured of immediate and complimentary noise abatement as required. Shifts change at 8am and 6pm. There is little expectation of being outside the building during dark hours except to enter the rear door with the ladder truck after a call or for rare night-drills. This will be a quiet facility when compared to the current use as a truck terminal.

I wish to thank you for all that you have bestowed upon your fire department as town meeting members. I respectfully request that you continue the support we have come to know. Our fire department has always been there no matter what the problem and has always provided the townspeople with a solution for whatever we are called upon to cure in the name of public safety.

Respectfully submitted,
Gerald F LaFlamme, Fire Chief