It’s been years since Kathryn Kelleher, one of the city’s parking enforcement officers, had a locker in the Concord Police Department.
As the force took on more female officers, a changing room with 19 lockers was created about 20 years ago from a converted office. Once the limited space started to overflow, Kelleher was bumped. As it stands today, accommodations would need to be made if additional female officers are hired, she said.
Kelleher also covers the reception desk in the department’s lobby. When she takes a sensitive call, she worries that people waiting to pay a parking ticket can hear every word.
On her way out of the building, she’ll cross paths with people in custody being walked through the garage to the booking area.
A new Concord police headquarters would solve many of these issues, she said.
“I know a lot of people are like ‘what’s the rush?'” Kelleher said. “The rush is that we don’t have room for parking people, we don’t have room for female officers…something has to be done, they deserve somewhere to go.”
Plans for a new police station would renovate the former Concord Insurance building for much of the department’s administrative work, while an addition would be built to house its emergency and essential operations. The new facility would more than triple the square footage of the current one, solving many of the limitations and layout problems, while providing offices for the city prosecutor’s office. It also carries a $45.5 million construction price tag, in addition to what the city previously spent on design and land acquisition, bringing the total above $50 million.
City Manager Tom Aspell introduced a new financing plan for the project at Monday’s City Council meeting, but councilors opted to delay their decision by two weeks, giving themselves and the public a chance to consider it.
The new plan would take on debt over a longer period of time and use “Housing Champion” grant money the city received from the state, as well as rainy day funds, to absorb some of the costs in the coming five years.
“We just got a completely different mechanism for financing it,” said Councilor Nathan Fennessy, a citywide representative, encouraging a short pause.
Fennessy also had lingering questions about how more than 70,000 square feet of space would be used – and whether there were substantial cost savings to be had in reducing it.
“If you had to spend a million dollars to look at a potential redesign to drop 10,000 square feet – I don’t know, maybe that saves you money,” he said. “Those are the sorts of things I would like to better understand.”
Other councilors and Mayor Byron Champlin, while agreeing to the pause, were wary of waiting longer than a few weeks and potentially missing a springtime construction start. They’ll revisit the decision on November 24.
Residents filled the council chambers at Monday’s hearing on the project. Among them, officers, both uniformed and not, lined the room.
A common thread stretched through much of the testimony: the need for a new station was clear to many, but the proposal couldn’t be separated from the rest of the city’s – and its residents’ – finances.
“As a young person who lives in Concord, the reality is, I most likely will never be able to own a home in Concord,” said Sayre Moskwa, who works in crisis and mental health support in the city. “I know friends of mine who have had to relocate because they lost their housing in Concord and could not find more affordable housing.”
Moskwa added that many of the organizations providing critical support and care in the city, organizations that the police department often refers people to, have never had the space or resources they needed, and rising costs push lower-earning workers out.
“We are losing, yearly, counselors because people can not afford it,” Moskwa said.
Moskwa said she supported a newer, safer and more productive police station, but she couldn’t back the cost.
At the same time, police officers, through their union leaders, and unsworn department staff argued for a safer and more secure facility.
“These improvements are not simply about convenience,” said Lieutenant Patrick Ofrias, president of the union representing police supervisors. “Daily inefficiencies and limitations take valuable time away from our mission of serving the public and ensuring safety.”
Despite the pause to consider Aspell’s plan, some city leaders endorsed the urgency of this project.
“It is currently a dangerous situation and we shouldn’t have our employees in the current structure,” said Amanda Grady Sexton, another citywide councilor. “I hope we can move forward quickly.”
Champlin argued that failing to support a new facility would undercut the police pay raises that councilors approved earlier this year. To spend that money on recruiting and retaining officers only to put them in an unsafe and demoralizing space made little sense to him.
“It’s a fantasy to think you’re going to be able to keep people when they have to work in those kinds of environments,” he said.
Others indicated that they saw the need but could not get behind the expense.
Between a new middle school and ground-up rehabilitation of Memorial Field and a new wastewater treatment plant, many of the largest facilities in the city are said to be in urgent need of updating. Some projects have already been delayed, which can lead to higher costs down the road. Each project has its backers who express a need for improvement.
At the same time, doing them all within a five-year span could hit city residents hard on their tax bills. A citywide property revaluation in 2026 is expected to shift more of the tax load onto people living in manufactured homes and multifamily housing.
To Ward Two Councilor Michele Horne, it all seemed like an onslaught.
Horne wanted a more concrete plan for how the city would grow its economy and raise revenue before adding this expense to its budget.
“We just had to raise taxes a month ago because our revenue is not meeting our own expectations,” she said, “But we’re not providing a plan to right this train.”
“We cannot ignore the juxtaposition,” she also noted, of “asking the community to bring food to the polls to help feed hungry neighbors, and now six days later we’re asking them to accept a $45 million project.”
The new financing plan from the city manager’s office would split the project into three bonds paid off over 30 years. By extending the length of the bond and splitting the debt into multiple phases, the plan increases the amount of time and interest spent on financing the station, but leads to less dramatic impacts on the tax rate. If the project comes in under budget, Aspell noted, the plan allows for flexibility to take on less debt later on.
The city would also spend $1.1 million in Housing Champions grant money from the state and $1.3 million in rainy day funds, spread out over several years, to tamp down some of the project’s draw on property taxes.
The rainy day fund, formally called an undesignated fund balance, is unspent city funds saved over time. In recent years, city leaders have largely used it to pad the tax rate during budget deliberations and pay for retention bonuses to police and public works employees.
Housing Champions grants were awarded by the state to select communities that met a checklist for being open to housing. The funds were intended for infrastructure improvements or per-unit production. The city has previously put money from this grant program towards a sewer project and the clearing of an encampment in Healy Park.
Councilor Stacey Brown, whose husband is a police officer, was forced to recuse herself from the discussion and decision by her peers.
The city’s charter notes that “no elective or appointive officer or employee of the City shall take part in a decision concerning the business of the City in which the officer or employee has a financial interest aside from salary as such, direct or indirect, greater than any other citizen or taxpayer.”
Brown felt she could participate because she didn’t stand to benefit financially from whether or not the city built the new station.
“My husband is not a construction worker,” she said.
Her fellow councilors disagreed, and in a 10-5 vote upheld a ruling from the mayor that she had a conflict of interest and could not participate in the debate.
