Still Time To Save Money

On Emergency Facilities

To the Editor:

Currently, three town organizations are considering new and separate facilities in three different locations. They are ambulance, police, and Hook & Ladder Fire Company.

Site acquisition, building, and maintenance costs for all three organizations in separate facilities in different locations is the most costly way to approach this need.

As a planner, I submit that with proper planning now, the town could develop a single site to accommodate all three public safety providers, resulting in huge cost savings both in the long and short term — a welcome solution in this economic environment.

The Fairfield Hills campus location offers clear advantages and immediate cost avoidance. The property can be designated as a town supported resource and it already has been utilized as an emergency townwide and area-marshaling center during the 2011 snow/ice storm. Existing utility and services are in place as well as access roads with favorable traffic light locations.

A plan for all three facilities can be developed as a phased program that would begin by building the ambulance facility with planned expansions to accommodate police and fire. Each organization would have its own separate facility with some shared adjacencies including a central control dispatch center. By centralizing pubic safety providers in a single area, many costly redundancies would be avoided and yet, with proper planning, each organization would have a new facility designed to meet its specific needs.

State of Connecticut representatives had reviewed this concept and acknowledged that a combined life-safety location/center may have the potential for state funding support vs requests to fund individual standalone facilities.

Before jumping at short-term solutions that may later produce long-term constraints, it would seem prudent for the town to consider alternate options and concepts that result in favorable cost and operational solutions as well as bottom-line savings.

Respectfully submitted,

Walter S. Motyka

5 Kent Road, Newtown                                                    June 18, 2012