Bourne proposes Route 28 site in Monument Beach for Cape-side fire station

BUZZARDS BAY — The decades-long quest to find a suitable location to build a fire station south of the Bourne Bridge took a step forward Tuesday night when the Select Board unanimously gave the go-ahead to Town Administrator Marlene McCollem to negotiate to buy land on Route 28 in Monument Beach.

The South Side Fire Station Building Committee recommends an 11-acre tract at 316 and 320 MacArthur Boulevard bisected by the so-called paper-road Motor Way. The site was earlier offered to the town for $2.8 million. The acreage behind it, off 169 Clay Pond Road, recently sold for $2,245,000.

Owner's project manager Richard Pomeroy doesn’t particularly favor the location, but project architect Saccoccio & Associates advised McCollem the site is workable for a firehouse. McCollem and Fire Chief David Cody agree.

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Any planned land purchase would face May Town Meeting scrutiny, and taxpayers have argued over the years about the highly traveled road not being the best spot to build a firehouse or police station.

But committee members have arrived at both the point where the 2023 town meeting warrant is set to open and the realization there is "no good place" for a southside firehouse in terms of land costs, geography, fire/ambulance response times and overall citizen satisfaction.

Select Board Chairman Peter Meier, also a building committee member, is optimistic.

“We’ll be ready for May (town meeting),” he said. “That’s been a goal. Whether we proceed to town meeting is another story. Of course, the longer we wait on these projects, the more the cost goes up.”

Meier says the overall project and review of possible station locations still must be explained to the public.

“This (location and cost) has to be sold to the community,” he said. “We may need public information sessions with the four civic groups in the service area.”

He says the overall goal is clear: "a serviceable station that is safe for people who work there and efficient in terms of area coverage” that carries "a reasonable price tag in terms of today’s numbers for such projects.”

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He said he does not know the total project cost, but officials have discussed a $15 million figure, which would include a land purchase.

The building committee, meanwhile, has reviewed four locations: the Shore Road ballfield tract at Monument Beach, county land at Dr. Julius Kelley Drive in Pocasset and the two boulevard locations. Scrutiny has followed the ‘search’ script adopted by previous firehouse committees and numerous fire chiefs, including the most recent group disbanded in the past year.

But there is more determination and optimism now to find a location, request funding, start construction and open a station long before planning in earnest starts for a Bourne Bridge replacement, which could ultimately complicate fire department operations as well as local traffic patterns.

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In addition, McCollem, Pomroy and Sacciccio have all worked together on fire station design and construction projects in other towns.

Bourne now operates stations at Buzzards Bay and North Sagamore. Firehouses in Pocasset and Monument Beach are closed; though apparatus is stored at the Thomas Philbrick Road facility with firefighter/paramedics houses in a mobile home outside the station.

A southside facility would respond to calls from Scraggy Neck in Cataumet to Mashnee Village across the Mashnee Dike at the canal’s west end. The response would also be to the Gallo Ice Arena next to the canal off Sandwich Road, the assisted living complex in Pocasset, the state mental health center along County Road and via the Otis rotary to the Barnstable County Correctional Facility at Otis ANG Base off Connery Avenue

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Bourne proposes building a firehouse on Route 28 for Cape side of town