2nd round of Potowomut fire station bids to be opened Friday

John Howell
Posted 9/2/14

Potowomut residents will learn Friday whether a basic fire station; a fire station with community room and police substation, or no new station at all is in their foreseeable future.

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2nd round of Potowomut fire station bids to be opened Friday

Posted

Potowomut residents will learn Friday whether a basic fire station; a fire station with community room and police substation, or no new station at all is in their foreseeable future.

For the second time, bids for construction of a station on the site of the former Potowomut School will be opened on Friday.

The first round of bids, which were opened this spring, exceeded the $2 million budget by about $1 million. The plans then went back to the drawing boards and, as Chief Edmund Armstrong explained Tuesday, revised to eliminate a plan to use the station as a backup emergency operations center. He said, for the facility to qualify as a command center, it would have to be bullet and bombproof.

Also, with this round of bids, contractors have been requested to submit bids on the basic station, plus the station with a community room and police substation.

“Hopefully, we’ll come in on budget,” Armstrong said.

At a recent pre-bid conference, Armstrong said 12 to 15 contractors showed up and there was considerable interest in the project. He hopes that interest will translate into a competitive process and a qualified bid within budget that he can bring to the City Council. In the first round, the city received eight bids ranging from a low of $3,050,000 to a high of $3,569,000.

The chief said construction of the station should take 10 months, although weather could be a delaying factor and, assuming everything falls into place, the station could be open by this time next year.

Potowomut fire and rescue service is presently provided by the Warwick department in Cowesett and the East Greenwich Fire District under a contract costing about $350,000. Depending on the circumstances, both departments don’t respond to all calls.

According to the chief and the city administration, the station would be staffed by one of the two engine companies now housed near Aldrich Junior High School, thereby not requiring additional personnel or equipment. The money saved by ending the contract with East Greenwich would underwrite the debt service of borrowing the $2 million to build it.

Ward 9 Councilman Steve Merolla, who has been pushing to build the station for years, hopes the facility will have space for a community room.

“I can’t believe there couldn’t be a room [in the new station],” he said Tuesday. “The only [city] building down there was the school, and now that’s gone.”

Even with a scaled back version of the station, he believes there could be a room large enough for community meetings.

Merolla would also like to see at least a reserve rescue at the station, as it could be used as a backup in situations where Warwick is called for mutual aid. He pointed out that Warwick residents are not charged for rescue calls and the cost is picked up by insurance. Mutual aid calls would be billed, thereby generating additional department revenues.

With declining school enrollment throughout the city, Potowomut School was closed and those students were sent to Cedar Hill School. Various uses of the building were explored, with a committee recommending the site be used for a fire station, but the building could not be re-purposed as a station and was torn down.

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