In May 2022, Saranac Lake’s village board sent three members from the Emergency Services Facility Committee representing police, fire and rescue services to the Station Design Conference in Chicago, beginning the overdue process of upgrading their facilities. On June 13, the delegation presented its findings from the conference to the board, reporting that they had determined a 20-year size need for a combined three-service facility of 35,160 square feet — a programming need of 29,300 square feet plus an additional 20% for hallways, mechanicals, etc.

A Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to provide a feasibility study for a combined facility was soon issued, requesting applicants “describe specific experience and knowledge of public safety/emergency response building design,” and “describe projects like this one which were completed in the previous five (5) years.”

Five Bugles Design, a subsidiary of Wendel Companies, a sponsor, presenter and exhibitor at the Chicago expo, was one of eight firms to bid on the contract. Their application included a portfolio of 14 projects. The two largest were 33,000 square foot projects — a fire/EMS station in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a fire station in Verona, Wisconsin, both completed in 2016. The most expensive was an $8.9 million firehouse in Bloomington, Minnesota in 2020. Cost per square foot of the projects in the Five Bugles’ portfolio ranged from $182 to $378 with a median rate of $242 per square foot. Five Bugles provided no examples of completed combined police, fire and rescue projects, falling short of the requested qualification. Nonetheless, Saranac Lake’s village board awarded the contract to Wendel/Five Bugles on Sept. 14, 2022.

The company’s first step in Saranac Lake was to reassess the size of the project. It calculated a total 20-year program need for the combined facility of 67,233 square feet, 2.3 times the size determined in Chicago by the delegation. At 67,233 square feet, the project would be arguably too large to fit at the 1.69-acre Broadway site currently occupied by our fire department and rescue squad, but not too large to fit around the abandoned St. Pius X high school on Petrova Avenue, at least in Wendel’s initial opinion.

Wendel estimated the project would cost $27,523,069, three times the price of any project in its portfolio. The rate Wendel proposes to charge Saranac Lake is $399.35 per square foot. Adjusting for inflation (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index Final Demand comparison, a measure of complete project costs), the per unit price is 33.5% higher than the median rate charged by Wendel on previous projects. In their feasibility study, Wendel cited a price of $40 million for building separate facilities for each service. That price represents a combined rate exceeding $600 per square foot.

It is unclear how members of the village board expected to pay for a facility that is two-and-a-half times our annual budget — maybe an exaggerated sense of available federal funds combined with overconfidence in our congressional representatives to deliver. Of the $28.5 million the village requested in Congressionally Directed Spending from the FY2024 budget, only $4.5 million has materialized. Even after adding the roughly $2.5 million balance of the reserve fund, absent any undisclosed source of funding, the village will have to provide up to $20 million of its own or spend years trying to find that much elsewhere. Our village and our emergency services can afford neither option.

Representatives from Wendel will have an opportunity to explain their underlying calculations when they attend a village forum later this year. Whatever their motivation, it seems clear that a 69,000 square foot $27.5 million emergency services facility is unrealistic for a community of 5,000.

Moving forward, the Village of Saranac Lake must reassess the program needs for emergency services, unfiltered by questionable outside motivations. It should do so under the guidance of experts who have no incentive for inflating the bottom line. If more reasonable numbers result, the village board needs to expand its search for suitable locations, including independent sites for the separate services. The board should also expand the Emergency Services Facility Committee to include members of the public who can offer “expertise and experience,” as stated in the committee’s original charter. For its part, the committee needs to open its doors to public participation. That step should have been taken at the very beginning of this process. There is no better way to increase the necessary support across the community.

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Mark Wilson lives in Saranac Lake.