Building plans designed for current and future in Ocean City
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – Addressing criticism the proposed Public Safety Building is too large and too expensive, Ocean City officials said it would be irresponsible to build for the present and ignore the future.
In a meeting with the Ocean City Sentinel last week, Mayor Jay Gillian, Business Administrator George Savastano, Chief Financial Officer Frank Donato, Fire Chief Jim Smith, Police Chief Jay Prettyman and Operations and Engineering Director Vince Bekier laid out their arguments why the new Public Safety Building plans are financially responsible for taxpayers and will look out for the needs of the resort for the next 75 to 100 years.
Local resident Micheal Hinchman said he is going forward with a referendum drive to force a public vote on the project, arguing the current fire headquarters at Fifth Street and Asbury Avenue is adequate but the city needs a new police station and court to replace the roughly century-old building on Central Avenue.
The city has proposed spending $42 million on an 86,232-square-foot building to combine the police station, fire department and court on the block where the current fire headquarters is located. (See related story, page A1.)
Donato said when the new plans for the building were presented at a Town Hall meeting in October, the base expense was estimated at $34 million to $35 million. That project was included in $116 million of capital expenses over the next seven years. He said he and city Auditor Leon Costello demonstrated that the debt service would cost roughly $500,000 to $600,000 a year over seven years – adding about a third to a half penny to the tax rate each year. That capital budget included the building, roads and drainage projects, back bay and lagoon dredging, purchasing vehicles and equipment and fixing buildings.
Donato said they picked seven years because it would take the city through three more bond sales in 2024, 2026 and 2028.
They have argued their projections have been accurate. Donato said in 2017, looking four years down the road, they projected debt service at $16.9 million. “When 2021 finally got here, the debt service was $16.6 million,” he said. “We projected it within $300,000 accuracy four years out. The moral of the story was you can rely on these numbers that we put out there. For people like me and Leon, it’s not rocket science. This isn’t smoke and mirrors … this isn’t a wild guess.”
He said debate has centered around whether the fire headquarters has to be included in the new building, but even critics have agreed something needs to be done with the police station and court.
“If it’s not $42 million we’re talking about … we still have to do a police building for some number that’s going to be no less than $20-25 million, and you still have to rehab fire headquarters because whether or not there is useful life left or not, it needs a shave and a haircut,” Donato said. “That can be a very expensive shave and a haircut if you get into FEMA flood elevations, base flood elevations.”
He explained while Hinchman has said the value of the fire headquarters is over $6 million, Donato and Smith said the actual building value is $1.4 million by assessment. Under FEMA rules, if rehabilitation of a building – whether private, commercial or public – exceeds 50 percent of the assessed value, the building has to be raised to meet new flood standards.
“From an appraisal standpoint, it if gets above the 50 percent threshold, it’s a game changer,” Donato said.
Smith added not adding the fire station to the Public Safety Building in the long run will mean missing out on a joint foundation that meets the FEMA requirements and would potentially cost more money.
From $34 million to $42 million
Hinchman has criticized the fact the cost of the plans rose to $42 million since the October Town Hall meeting.
Donato said the original cost was an estimate based on the preliminary design that was presented at the Town Hall, but after that Garrison Architects did the design development plans and had a professional estimater go through every component of the building to cost it out, including mechanical and electrical.
“They got a much more detailed analysis of the cost estimate,” Donato said, and at the Town Hall the other costs were noted but not included, such as demolition of the old buildings.
The professional estimater came in with a cost of $38 million, according to Savastano, and that didn’t include the demolition of the former fire headquarters, police station and court and site development for those properties. The city added $4 million for that work.
“At the Town Hall meeting, we were candid when we said that $35 million didn’t include soft costs,” Prettyman said. “We’re not that far away from where we were in October initially.
Building for the future
“One of the things we believe is that we should build a facility that meets our needs, best as we can project them, into the future, and build the right building,” Savastano said, “and then figure out what the cost is for that.”
In past proposals, the city was setting a price point first and seeing what it could do with that. Doing that, he said, compromised the functionality of the building. He said Prettyman and Smith worked with the architects to figure out what their needs were at present and what they projected their needs to be in the future to design the right building.
It was decided it made the most sense to build a new combined building rather than just the police and court and then have to rehab the fire headquarters down the road.
Prettyman said he has been looking at proposals for a new police station and court building for 12 years, starting under former police chief Chad Callahan.
He said they would be told they had $15 million or $17 million and to work within that to figure out what they could build.
“We could never build anything that anyone was really in love with because we couldn’t build something that was adequate for our current and future needs based on the dollar number given,” Prettyman said.
Then the mayor came to them and asked them to plan for the most effective building to serve the city’s needs for the next 75 to 100 years and the administration would try to figure out if the city can afford it and how to pay for it, he added.
“It was the first time in 12 years’ worth of projects with several architects, several engineering firms, that we’ve ever been asked, ‘what do you guys need or what do you project your needs for the next 75 to 100 years’ and design that way.
Every other project, they said, was based on having X amount of money or Y amount of space and told to “figure it out.”
No one got excited about it because it “was always a project being forced down our throats and was just barely adequate. Do we really want to spend that much money on something we’re going to grow out of tomorrow? It just stalled. It never got any momentum,” Prettyman said.
This time, he and Smith were given the task of working together on meeting the current and future needs. He said the best indication of future performance is past performance so they look at how equipment and staffing have evolved and they are predicting what makes sense for years to come. “That is what we have to build for,” Prettyman said.
“We could rebuild right now and maybe be adequate for what we have, but it’s incredibly irresponsible to build a building you want to last for 75 to 100 years based on what you have today with no room for expansion, no futuristic ideas on what you want to provide for the city,” he said. “We’ve come up with a building design we feel is not only adequate for what we have for today, but gives us room and also the ability to advance both of our public safety agencies for the next 75 to 100 years.”
Critical needs
Prettyman said the department needs space for seasonal officers, who now have to get changed in the hallways because there isn’t space. The proposed Public Safety Building has a combined professional state-of-the-art classroom for training for police and firefighters, and that can be an emergency operations center. An indoors firing range will eliminate the need for police to travel to the county facility to do their training. The two departments also will be able to work together much more closely on a daily basis.
Donato said although a comment was made that the last time an officer fired his weapon in the line of duty was 15 or so years ago to put down a dog, “that doesn’t negate the fact they have to stay up on training and qualifying constantly.”
Prettyman said Hinchman focuses on square footage based on needs and about width of fire station bay doors based on equipment needs today, but isn’t considering future needs.
“He is worrying about dollars and cents, the bean-counter part,” Prettyman said of Hinchman, “and I’m worrying about providing the best services the police department can for the next 75 to 100 years. It is completely irresponsible to build a building that 20 or 30 years from now” didn’t meet the needs of the city.
Smith said when he started with the fire department in 1994, there were six pieces of equipment. Now there are 12 with the hopes of getting another one. “We have nowhere to put it,” he said.
Smith said Hinchman’s comments about Absecon’s fire department being comparable to Ocean City were off the mark. He said Garrison Architects designed the Absecon fire station which does about 300 calls a year. He said the Ocean City Fire Department answered 300 calls on July Fourth alone. While Absecon had 18-foot and 19-foot wide bays, Ocean City is looking at 20 and 21-foot bays. “We’re right there with them,” Smith said, noting Garrison is working on four projects that have bays the same size as Ocean City. The doors on the buildings are universal at 14 by 14 feet.
The fire chief said living space for his firefighters is extremely limited and there is no extra space to accommodate female firefighters.
Smith also said with the fire department potentially taking over inspections in town, there is a need for more space.
“What we have in the plans is for future growth as well. We have office space,” he said. “I see us logically taking over inspections in this town. Once we do it, we’ll be behind the eight-ball if we don’t earmark what we feel is the right area and space.”
Prettyman noted the fire department is also under new regulations that weren’t in place years ago when all they had to do was throw on their fire coats and pants and rush out to fight fires. Now OSHA regulations revolve around how to dry gear and decontaminate it and there is no room in the current station to do that.
Prettyman said city officials may have erred in initially describing extra space, more than 4,500 square feet, on the third floor as a records room because it is really meant to be available for future growth. The cost to enclose that part on the third floor of the proposed building now is much more cost effective than waiting until after construction is done and doing an addition later.
Not just police and fire; population averages 90,000
Gillian said people forget that Ocean City’s public safety department has to do everything a major community must do and being on and island means doing even more. “We’re an island town,” he said. “We’re not just firefighters. We’re water rescue, we’re EMTs.”
“It’s about public safety, whether you’re on your boat, your home, you’re driving across the bridge, you’re walking, you’re biking, playing pickle ball. If you saw July Fourth here, it was a madhouse,” Gillian said. “There were 430 calls (including police) on July Fourth.”
He asked what is the value of being able to have a police or fire response in a minute or two? “I don’t know what the price of that is, but I want a fully equipped (department) to get there. We’re not ma and pa anymore,” he said.
The geographic location of an island also limits mutual aid, Prettymay said.
Savastano noted the summer population puts Ocean City as perhaps the third largest municipality in New Jersey.
Newark has a population of about 280,000, Jersey City is at 264,000, Patterson at 147,000 and Elizabeth is 129,000, according to numbers provided by Prettyman.
“Our summer population is estimated 130,000 to 160,000,” Prettyman said. “That puts us as the third- or fourth-most-populated municipality in the state for three to four months of the year. Even in our shoulder seasons, we dip to be closer to 80, 90 or 100,000, we’re sixth of seventh most populated. For seven or eight months of the year we’re at least the eighth out of 535 municipalities in the state.”
The police chief acknowledged that Ocean City’s 160,000 is not equivalent in terms of the needs compared to cities such as Camden or Trenton, “but we’re talking about servicing volume.”
Donato said that is why Ocean City received more than $7 million in stimulus money from the federal government while other towns in the county received far less.
“They average out our population at 90,000, give or take. Anybody who wants to take a shot at our population and base our police and fire needs on population always points to the census,” Donato said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s irresponsible to look at that 11,700 or 11,900.
“Just because 11,700 people are reported on census that they live in Ocean City, doesn’t mean that’s our population.”
Prettyman said the “service population” has to count everyone from weekend visitors to construction workers, teachers, students, renters and second homeowners.
“If we do this project, we’re saving the taxpayers money,” Prettyman said. “We’re saving costs of two buildings. If we build a $25 million police station, at some point you’re going to build a $25 million fire department. We’re killing two birds with one stone, saving taxpayers money, providing a better product as a unified public safety department rather than two separate entities.”
Donato and Gillian said they are waiting to see if there are additional funding possibilities through President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan and they are hoping that as the COVID-19 pandemic subsides, the higher prices associated with it will decline.
Gillian said the next “milestone” will be Labor Day weekend. After that, they will have a better timeline for the project.
Bekier noted as the city does its due diligence, officials will continue to refine the project.