By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer
Whether the current South Portland City Council agreed with last year’s purchase of the South Portland Armory for $650,000; councilors agree now that the city owns the asset, it has to do something with it.
During a council workshop on Monday, the council disagreed about the best way to move forward with the now largely vacant building’s rehabilitation, largely because some councilors had lingering regrets about the process the city went through to purchase the building.
“We bought this building without any true public participation,” said Councilor Linda Boudreau. “We own it now and we have to live with that.”
Councilors Jim Hughes and Ralph Baxter echoed Boudreau’s opinions.
“We never had a public vote on should we spend $600,000 on this,” Hughes said. “This was all done in executive sessions.”
Baxter said his initial opinion of the purchase was the city had purchased an overly expensive storage area.
According to a position paper prepared by Acting City Manager Jim Gailey for a March 27, 2006 council meeting, the city had an interest in purchasing the property since the Maine Department of Defense sold the roughly 35,000 square foot building in the 1990s. The Museum of Glass and Ceramics purchased the property in 2002, but abandoned it three years later due to bankruptcy.
In early March of last year, the council directed Gailey and a bankruptcy attorney to submit a bid to purchase the building during an executive session. The council authorized the purchase at the March 27 meeting and at Gailey’s suggestion, then Mayor Maxine Beecher appointed a South Portland Armory Committee to develop a plan for the building.
“I truly am proud we did buy that building and the land,” Beecher said on Monday. “I think we gave that committee a whole year. It isn’t like there hasn’t been any input.”
The committee consisting of Gailey, Councilors Jim Soule and Kay Loring, residents and city staff presented their recommendations for rehabilitating the building to the council on Monday. Gailey said he envisioned the first phase of the project to be the council’s acceptance of the committee’s report in a public forum. He will draft a resolution to present at a Nov. 5 public hearing and if accepted by the council, the report will be included with the strategic plans for other capital improvement projects.
Loring said the committee was in unanimous agreement about using the building for a new city hall with other accessory uses. Its other recommendations included a main library with accessory uses, an arts and theater center, artist living/working spaces and non-profit cooperative spaces.
Regardless of the future use, the committee recommended the police and fire departments will maintain their storage space for supplies, trucks, trailers and boats in the building’s westerly garage wing. Loring said the fire department is currently in the position of seeking out heated storage for some of its equipment. She said it would cost less than $35,000 to equip the four bay garage, which houses “millions worth of emergency vehicles” – largely purchased with homeland security funds – with heat, lights and new doors.
“If you could see what they’re using in there, you’d be embarrassed,” Loring said. “It looks like an old garage.”
Gailey said he will issue a request for proposals for the garage work, which could be presented to the council within two or three weeks.
As the Armory committee was given the task of only brainstorming future uses, it did not go into the financial implications, Soule said. He said he envisioned a two-step process in which the council would offer guidance and then the committee would go out and gather the financial information.
Boudreau, however, said she was not ready to explore the issue further without more public input.
“There’s major expense behind doing the follow up work,” she said. “Just getting conceptual drawings and building plans isn’t going to be small change. I just see us committed to a major cost to find out if the public in fact wants to do this and bear the cost.”
Boudreau favored a referendum vote before delving into what it would cost to convert the building into a new city hall.
According to its report, the committee agreed, “the type of work performed in a city hall and the typical hours of operation were thought to be a good fit, (“good neighbor”) for the abutting neighborhood.”
The committee also found there “is a real and urgent need for the city to consolidate its services into one strategic location.” It recommended consolidating the current city hall offices with the satellite planning and development and assessor’s offices. The committee also recommended relocating the Emergency Operations Center from the basement of the public safety building to the Armory. The basement lies below flood stage levels and Gailey said a level 2 hurricane could potentially disable the office.
If there is sufficient room after consolidating municipal offices, the committee also recommended moving the school superintendent’s office from Memorial Middle School to the new building – an idea that had support among the council.
Gailey said when it comes to fitting city hall and accessory municipal buildings into the Armory, “it’s at a wash at this point.” To maximize the space, he said a mezzanine could be constructed in the 11,531 square foot former drill hall to create two floors and an attic.
Soule and Armory committee member Ginger Jones suggested the sale or lease of the current city hall might help offset some of the renovation costs.
The committee also considered converting the Armory into a new main library; however, Loring said the idea lost momentum after former Library Director Marian Peterson resigned. Loring said initially the committee thought the library and city hall could share the building.
“What we found out when the library came in [is] they needed all of the space in the Armory and city hall needed all of the space in the Armory,” Loring said.
The committee also considered incorporating cultural arts space, artists’ space, meeting space and the Greater Portland Visitor’s Bureau kiosk with the library – uses that could also be combined with a new city hall – but determined the current library is in a good location, near schools and elderly housing.
No matter what the future use of the building will be, the council and committee expressed concern about pedestrian and cyclist access to the site. The committee’s report states, “Although crosswalks and signals exist for safe passage by pedestrians, many individuals do not feel safe traversing the intersection by foot or by bike.” The report also states, “the committee highly recommends that some type of pedestrian enhancement be made to the Broadway corridor, in particular the area between Waterman Drive and Ocean Street.”
Among the ideas for improving safety for pedestrians is to construct an overhead walkway. Baxter, who raised the idea during the renovation of the Casco Bay Bridge, said he didn’t press the issue after the state put a price tag of more than $1 million on such a structure.
The Central Maine Power (CMP) corridor, which constitutes roughly 2.5 acres, by CMP Public Affairs Manager John Carroll’s estimation, could also present opportunities for pedestrians. The corridor connects Broadway and Highland Avenue and could serve as an off-road pedestrian and bicycle trail between the Greenbelt Walkway and Hinckley Park.
The city will need to obtain a long-term license agreement from CMP to allow parking and travel corridors on the land. The license would also be needed to install plantings to buffer the property from the nearby neighborhood.
Gailey said structural reports have proven the building is sound, however, it will need work before any offices can move in. Immediate needs, recommended by the committee, include patching the roof, repointing the brickwork, replacing the windows. Further down the road, the roof must be brought up to code, parking and a driveway will need to be established, and the building will have to be heated.