Saranac Lake residents who have seen the latest plan to build an emergency services facility at 33 Petrova Ave. might wonder how this 59,000 square-foot project — including 120 interior rooms and a half kilometer of hallways for a combined 83-person fire, rescue and police force — ever got so large. The answer can be found at the beginning of the process, three-and-a-half years ago.

In July 2022, when the village solicited bids to conduct a feasibility study for a combined police, fire and rescue complex, it did not ask bidders to conduct a programming-needs analysis for the services. Weeks earlier, the village sent a delegation of our first responders to a Station Design Conference in Chicago to determine that figure. They came up with 35,160 square feet.

However, Wendel/Five Bugles design included a new programming needs analysis in its winning bid to conduct the feasibility study. That move subsequently increased the size of the project by 91% to 67,233 square feet, a size deemed too large to fit at the adjacent fire and rescue sites on Broadway.

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A new site

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Soon afterward, Saranac Lake’s Public Safety Building Committee turned its focus to the former St. Pius X high school building at 33 Petrova Ave. — a 39,000-square-foot structure owned by Citizen Advocates. Two problems immediately confronted Wendel’s designers at the new site: All but two interior portions of the one-story building was built over a crawl space, its structure unable to to bear the weight of police and emergency vehicles; The perimeter of Pius X is hemmed in by a buried stream along its south and east sides, an electrical utility right-of-way along its west side; and the village sewer main separating the building from the Hot House garden center to the north.

When it came time to lay out the initial design, Wendel discovered there was not enough space to house EMS and fire apparatus (all located outside the Pius footprint), and too much space for everything else (mostly inside the footprint).

Specifically, of the 20,178 square feet of fire and rescue apparatus bays established in Wendel’s programming needs analysis, the site could only accommodate 18,820 square feet — a reduction of 2,367 square feet, or 11.17%. In cutting the programming need for apparatus bays while keeping the programming need for the whole facility unchanged, Wendel effectively hid the excess capacity of the rest of the building. Instead of 1,687 square feet — the difference between the building design and the total programming need –the figure was actually 4,054 square feet. This excess capacity, the equivalent of a stand-alone 63-by-63-foot building, is significant not just for the additional cost to build, operate and maintain. It also erased the 3,000 square feet of saved space in shared facilities promised by Wendel and the project’s promoters in March 2023.

Perhaps it is a credit to the persuasiveness of Wendel’s team that neither the mayor nor the deputy mayor nor any member of the Public Safety Building Committee sought to correct the disconnect between the needs analysis and schematic design when Wendel presented its feasibility study in October 2023. Nor is there any sign that our elected officials considered the impact on village taxpayers and budgets. (At the start of the project, Saranac Lake required that applicants prepare a taxpayer impact analysis as part of the feasibility report. Instead, Wendel drafted, and the village signed, a contract for the job which omitted that step.) Last year, by a 3-2 vote, the village board awarded Wendel the first installment of a $1.87 million contract to refine its schematic design.

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A new design and more cuts to vehicle space

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Earlier this year, the Wendel team came to town to consult police, fire and rescue services in an effort to further cut back the design’s overlap into utility rights-of-way and nearby wetlands. The design was delivered in August and is available at Saranac Lake’s website. While it reduced the facility’s overall size by 9,865 square feet (14.3%), it also further reduced space for fire, rescue and police vehicles: a version of that design, delivered to New York’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, shows total space dedicated to the combined fleet had been slashed 19.3% (4,443 square feet) from the targets set by Wendel’s needs analysis.

Repeated Freedom Of Information Law (FOIL) requests to the village to see the worksheets detailing cuts to the specific department fleets have been denied.

Much has been made of the excesses of Wendel’s latest floor plan — 20 individual bedrooms, six kitchens or kitchenettes, three separate 14-seat conference rooms–inside the Pius X building footprint. Of greater concern should be the cuts made to the declared need for service vehicle and apparatus bays outside the footprint.

Wendel/Five Bugles has every incentive to design (and manage construction of) the largest project it can get away with. When their team addresses the village board on Dec. 8, perhaps the first question Saranac Lake trustees should ask is whether the company’s extravagant programming needs analysis and miscalculation of St. Pius X’s excess interior capacity is simply a matter of sloppy engineering, or whether the village is being bamboozled.

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Mark Wilson is a resident of Saranac Lake