Town of Easton working to replace outdated, unsafe facilities for police, fire, public works

EASTON, Mass. (WLNE) — The town of Easton is working on a project that would consolidate 17 facilities into three new ones, including the Public Works Department, Fire Department and Police Departments.

On Monday, town officials offered a public tour of their current facilities to show residents what exactly they’re dealing with.

Both the fire department and the police department were built back in 1969. Fire Chief Justin Alexander said there’s a laundry list of challenges that come with working in the outdated facilities.

“They don’t have the room, the size, they don’t have the ability to keep our firefighters protected from the carcinogens, the diesel fumes that we have from these trucks. We wash our gear we know it has cancer type things on it, we clean it and then we put it right back here, it gets the diesel fumes on it and then we wear it again,” Alexander explained.

Easton Police Chief Keith Boone said there is not enough space at the police department either.

“We’ve really run out of room, as far as gender equality, we’ve hired three new female police officers in the last six months, we really have nowhere to put them so we’re retrofitting the building on the fly as we do these things,” Boone said.

Connor Read, Easton’s town administrator said with the lack of space at these facilities and with the plethora of safety hazards, they need new facilities.

“We don’t want is for folks who are doing dangerous work to have to come back to facilities that aren’t as safe as they ought to be, these facilities have asbestos, they don’t have sprinkles, so we’re in a fire station right now with no sprinklers. None of our facilities have sprinklers,” Read explained.

Feasibility funding was approved by voters in 2021. The project would replace 17 facilities with three new facilities across two sites, including a Public Safety Complex that would house police and fire on Depot Street. There would also be a new Public Works Complex at the same site and a new fire substation at Washington and Main Streets.

“The way that public construction projects of this size are funded in Massachusetts is through what’s called a debt exclusion, where voters have a two step process where they authorize the town to borrow or issue bonds to pay for that capital project and then they vote to increase their local property taxes to pay for principal and interest on those notes until it’s paid off, usually for 30 years,” Reed continued.

With the entire project costing an estimated total of $150M, Read said it would cost the median homeowner $60 more dollars a month in taxes.

The needed increase in taxpayers money is what peaked Easton resident Heather Wilanson’s interest in attending a tour of the facilities.

“It just also affects us taxpayers as well, so that’s the information we were looking for as well,” Wilanson explained. “I was very surprised at really how limited the space is, I can definitely understand the issues that they are facing that they were mentioning throughout the tour.”

A special town meeting will be held on October 23, where the town will ask voters to approve the appropriation of funds for the project. Then on November 4, residents will vote on funding the approved borrowing for the project.

To see a breakdown of the entire project, go to eastonpsw.com.