hello my name is Dean Charter i'm vice chair of the actton select board and I'm chairman of the Department of Public Works building committee i'm here to talk to you about article 7 which would authorize borrowing for the construction of new public works
facility there will actually be two votes required in order to move this project forward the first one is going to be at the ballot in April to approve the borrowing this would be a debt exclusion override and that needs to be approved
by a 50% vote subsequent to that we have to go to town meeting and get a twothirds majority vote to approve the borrowing at town meeting the uh I'll go into some details
about the project now so the existing building was built in 1969 it was originally sized over 30,000 square ft but due to financial
situations the decision was made to cut it down to 19,000 square ft the building was barely adequate at the time that it was opened in 1969 and that was when we had a population in town of only
14,000 only about 80 miles of of streets and virtually no sidewalks since that time we now have over 110 miles of public road we've got 54 miles of sidewalks we have many more public
spaces and we've got a very active storm water management program most of which did not exist in 1969 building is in bad shape uh mechanically structurally and it's just
undized this has been a high priority for the select board for six years to replace the building back in in 2021 there was a feasibility study produced of the building
select board authorized a feasibility study committee to go over that study and the determination was made that a new building needs to be built using some of the analysis that was done in the feasibility
study in May of 2023 I made a presentation at town meeting looking for design money for the new building that was uh backed by the select board that was approved by a
threequarter majority on a clicker vote in the sum of $1,225,000 for design of the building we've been advancing that design ever since then the original building that was suggested
was would be 47,000 square ft and we've since cut that down considerably and we'll be talking about that tonight so we get into some of the details the current conditions in the building i spoke earlier about it being
undersized and in bad condition you can see that situation there's no locker rooms adequate locker rooms there are no facilities for female employees we have a severe problem with sound and with
fumes and the migration of fumes from the work areas into the office areas and into the other occupied areas plus problems with poor air quality throughout the building
there's also lack of proper storage for fuels for toxic materials uh not sufficient area for workshops to work on at small equipment and the mechanic spaces are all
undized public works equipment has gotten larger and larger over the years and what happens now is that most of the equip many of the pieces of equipment cannot properly fit inside the repair bays and cannot be raised to proper height for
maintenance the mechanics bays there are four bays with three mechanics working are used not only to repair all the public works equipment but also the fire trucks the police cruisers and many of the inspectional vehicles that are based
out of town hall the uh furthermore there have been a number of mezzanine spaces that have been developed uh other little storage areas created some of these areas are not properly sprinklered for fire
protection most of those mezzanines do not meet building code or OSHA codes as I mentioned earlier about very poor air quality uh this picture here shows you what the air quality is on what I call a good day inside the mechanics
bays looking at the numbers we've been de working very hard with value engineering from the original proposal back in November we thought the new construction cost would be almost
$38 million we've managed to value engineer quite a bit of of uh what would be considered not essential out of the building and now the construction cost
is just about $30 million then to that we would have to add some of the soft costs that such as the architectural costs inspectional fees equipment what have you so the original project cost in
November was considered to be $47 million now we're down to $38 million project so we think that presents a really good value to the taxpayers there's just some conceptuals of what the outside of the building would look
like the building will be located in exactly the same location as the existing building we'll have to evacuate the site move operations to different locations throughout town during construction and then move back
in afterwards the original plan was to try to keep operations going while we phase the construction of this new building but it was determined that we could save quite a bit of money by moving much more quickly on this project
um by moving destroying the entire demolishing the entire building and constructing it all at once this is the floor plan the problem that we have with the
existing building is that we have so much equipment that's necessary for our operations it takes a prolonged amount of time to park it and unpark it now the question's been raised why do you need to park all the equipment inside well a lot of the vehicles we
have are diesel powered and they have to go out in very short notice at night usually 35 to 40 nights during snow conditions the longer that it takes to get the equipment started
and warmed up longer the delay is to get those streets safe also starting a cold piece of equipment puts undue burden on the vehicle and the vehicles generally last longer if they're parked inside they're not exposed to environmental stress
they're not exposed to the UV light many contractors look at keeping a dump truck for 15 to 17 years we routinely look at keeping a piece of equipment for 25 years so we've saved money over the years by maintaining the
equipment in a uh a a building although it's much too small for the purpose also in the plan we show an office area which would be for the public works administrative staff the engineering department there are also some
workshops and then the garage base what's the cost to the taxpayer well based on the $35,200,000 price tag that we think is the appropriate number average cost of the average
household would be about $275 per year the average condo would be paying about $160 a year we think that that that represents good value further down in this slide you'll see
the cost of the building escalated year after year if we delay the project building costs go up by about 5% per year so no matter what happens if you wait four years this building will cost you at least 20% more and you can see
the impact on your tax bill this building has been extensively designed we've looked at various assumptions for the heating and cooling system uh this first base system would
be for a gas fired heating system uh and we're using that just for comparison purposes we could not in fact put in a gas fired heating system in this building but that would violate the stretch energy code which was approved at town meeting
overwhelmingly that has forced all new construction in town to go to fossil fuel fossil-free fuel system we also looked at using airsource heat pumps uh which are much more efficient uh
produce fewer greenhouse gases but we still don't think that that's the right economic choice for us so we're going to go with a ground source heat pump system we'll have about 30 wells in the uh on the
site that's to put that in context we have about eight wells at the North Actton Fire Station and I believe there are 67 wells in the ground at the boardwalk campus site in West
Actton so we think that again uh this is going to be an environmentally responsible project it will continue to in our move towards going to all fossil-free
fuel and we think it's represents the best cost analysis for the taxpayers we do have some extensive information about the paybacks uh that all will be available and are all
available online on the town website this project has been backed unanimously by the board of selectmen it's been overwhelmingly supported by the department of public works building committee and it has been endorsed for
its environmental reasons by the green advisory board i hope that you will support this project thank you