North County Police Fight Crime, Outdated Facilities
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Top, one of two cells in the Williamstown police station and, left, the narrow set of stairs leads to them. A cramped, damp storage closet holds paper records. |
It was a warm day, but not hot, and the tourist noted that there was a window open right next to the window that held the air conditioner.
"That doesn't seem very efficient," she said.
She did not know the half of it.
The air conditioner in question was just one symptom of larger inefficiencies in the town's police facility, which is so antiquated that town meeting this spring approved spending $143,000 to design a new station.
Williamstown and its larger neighbor to, the east, the city of North Adams, both are struggling with the challenges of offering 21st-century public safety in mid-20th century facilities.
And that A/C that runs for no apparent reason? It is just the tip of the iceberg.
"We keep all of our 911 equipment and radio equipment in there," Williamstown Police Chief Kyle Johnson said of the room served by that window unit. "We can't keep it cool without keeping the door to that room open, so it's unsecured. It's a tiny room, and the equipment makes so much heat that we have to keep it open."
Tiny is a word you hear a lot when Johnson gives a tour of his station, which the town created from a converted 1920s era fraternity house in the 1950s.
Nowhere is the need for space more apparent than in the station's dispatch center, where there is space for two dispatchers but only one radio can be used because they are so close together that feedback from either unit would make the other inoperable.
"They're in there fighting for time on the one working radio," Johnson said. "It's clumsy.
"During [Tropical Storm] Irene, we had three dispatchers in here, and the phone was ringing off the hook. But there was only the one radio."
In North Adams, the space devoted to dispatch is also a problem.
"The dispatch center is climate controlled, but the air conditioner is undersized for the amount of space we have," North Adams Police Director Michael Cozzaglio said. "And the equipment puts out so much heat ... two weeks ago, the computers were down for a week because it was so oppressively hot."
And the brains of the system, which is kept in the station's basement, has its own heating issues.
"There's radiant heating in the floor down here, so you can't turn the heat off in the room where the computer equipment is kept," Cozzaglio explained while conducting a tour. "We have to keep the air conditioning on in here even in the winter time."
Unlike Williamstown, the North Adams police are at least operating in a building designed as a police station. Problem is, that design is out of date.
"It's the 1950s in here," North Adams Commissioner of Public Safety E. John Morocco said of the city's police and fire stations, which he oversees from his office above the fire house.
"On the fire side, the building is just too old. It's a 1954-55 building that was outdated in 1956. Both sides need to be replaced."
 They're in there fighting for time on the one working radio. It's clumsy.
— Police Chief Kyle Johnson |
The Steeple City has a twice the issue with aging, outdated public safety facilities.
The fire and police stations, which back up to one another and were cobbled together in the 1980s are too small, too inefficient and not handicapped accessible. Morocco's own office, along with that of Fire Director Stephen Meranti, is only accessible by a long flight of stairs.
Morocco said that theoretically, the offices could be moved to the ground floor of the fire house, but Meranti was quick to jump into the conversation.
"But where?" Meranti asked, eliciting a shrug from Morocco who well knows the impracticality of eating up ground floor space for offices. "It looks like a pretty good-sized building from the outside, but it really isn't."
As it is, Meranti's department stores two pieces of equipment off site and has to shuffle engines around on American Legion Drive in order to access vehicles housed in the back of the bay.
That shuffling is the most visible sign of the fire station's deficiencies, but as with the police stations in both North Adams and Williamstown, there is much more than meets the eye.
"We've outgrown the space here," Meranti said. "The roof needs to be replaced. We're using a tarp to deflect (leaking) water off our turnout gear. The electrical system is old and needs to be replaced. The windows — I have a towel I put up here in my office to catch the snow that gets in in the winter, and there are wire coat hangers holding windows closed in other parts of the building."
The fire station has a shower facility with four shower heads, but only one of them works. Although the department does not now have any female firefighters, it has no separate locker facility or bunk room if that day ever comes. And the Fire Department uses a storage area that is underneath the Police Department's garage, but the floor leaks, and any time a police vehicle is brought in with snow on it, the melting snow drips down into the storage room.
Not that the Police Department has it any better.
"No. 1, the building is aged out for the most part," North Adams Mayor Richard Alcombright said. "It's inefficient, and on any given day in the winter, you can walk in and see snow on the inside of the windows — not a good thing. The layout is poor. The heating is in bad shape. We could do improvements, but the improvements would trigger the need for significant (Americans with Disabilities Act) modifications.
"The Department of Justice served us with an ADA report a couple of years ago. There were over 350 or so things in the city we have to address with ADA issues, and a lot of that is from the Public Safety building."
The lack of a wheelchair ramp into the city's police station is one of the most visible and talked about deficiencies in the structure.
"If we were to even build a ramp into the police station, that would trigger requirements for everything else to make it ADA compliant: wider thresholds, handicapped cells, an elevator to the cells from a secure booking areas, which we don't have," Alcombright said.
A secure booking area is a major item on the wish list for both North Adams' and Williamstown's police departments.
"It's small, and the setup is inefficient," Williamstown's Johnson said. "There's no place to put anyone. If we make an arrest, we have to bring the suspect in through the dispatch area, which should be a secure area. We have to assign an officer to stay with the person we bring in. It can get complicated.
"It's not uncommon to have a victim and a defendant in at the same time, and there's no easy way to keep them from crossing paths."
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The North Adams Police Department is not handicapped accessible; left, a tarp protects equipment from a leaky fire station roof; holes reveal exposed wiring. |
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Once suspects are processed in Williamstown, they have to be brought down a narrow, steep stairway to the town's cells, which are themselves inadequate.
"The cells are not sight and sound separated," Johnson said. "Our cells pass [state] inspection annually only because we're so old we're grandfathered in and they overlook the deficiencies."
By law, Williamstown is required to hold prisoners overnight if they are brought in too late to be transported to court for arraignment. If they're brought in on a Friday, that means three nights in the town lockup; on a holiday weekend, it means four nights.
And to call the accommodations Spartan would be an understatement.
"There's a metal bed and a toilet," Johnson said. "There's no sink, so they can't wash their face. They can't shower. They can't get their own water, so we have to bring them water.
"A lot of times, we're arresting good people on old warrants. I'm not saying they're innocent, but they're being brought in to answer for mistakes they may have made years ago.
"These conditions are not up to what the town of Williamstown wants to provide."
Conditions are not especially hospitable for the officers either in North Adams or Williamstown.
In both stations, the police lack showers. That means if an officer is exposed to a contaminant — as often happens in the normal course of doing his or her duty — he or she is sent home to clean up. That means bringing the contaminant into the home of the officer and eating up time in their shift.
In North Adams, an office built for two is crammed with three desks and serves four detectives.
In Williamstown, there is no locker room at all, no separate space for the town's female officer to change in and out of her uniform and no meeting space that can accommodate the town's 12 full-time officers and up to five or six part-time officers; if Johnson does have to hold a training session for the department, he uses meeting space at the nearby Williams Inn.
North Adams' Alcombright could be talking for public safety personnel in both communities when he says, "Every square foot is being used and stretched."
The solution in both communities is to start over.
In Williamstown, the hope is to build a new station on the other side of Town Hall.
In North Adams, Morocco and Alcombright agree that the ideal solution would be to find an existing building - or buildings - that can be "repurposed" to house either the police department or fire department or both.
"We've been looking at potential sites for the last 2 1/2 years," Morocco said. "There were some grants available under the (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), but they had to be shovel-ready projects, and it costs $30,000 to $40,000 just to do the design work."
Replacing the city's existing facilities would cost at least $12 million to $15 million, Alcombright estimated. But it is too soon even to think about specific costs.
"That's just a guess," Alcombright said.
| I think our technology is probably just as good as anywhere you can find. ... The building is just horribly inadequate.
— Mayor Richard Alcombright
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One thing officials in both communities can say is that the antiquated facilities do not prevent their police forces from providing services.
"I would suggest that our 911 infrastructure is as good as it gets," Alcombright said. "I think our technology is probably just as good as anywhere you can find.
"The building is just horribly inadequate."
Williamstown's Johnson says he is not asking or expecting the town to provide a "Taj Mahal" of police stations, but the department's current digs make the job more difficult than it needs to be.
"I don't want to sound like a whiner," said Johnson, the town's police chief for seven years and a member of the force since 1992. "We've been able to serve the town well with the facility we have, and we'll keep doing it.
"But it could be more efficient."
Tags: , ADA, facilities, fire station, obsolete, police station,
