Each and every one of these precincts is functional and utilitarian. They are not pretty. They don’t need to be. I couldn’t tell you when they were built, but it sure wasn’t recently.

Couple the cost of our new police palace with the list of police officers in this town making more than $100,000/year plus benefits (does this include their $50/hour overtime for watching CL&P backhoes as required by law?) as detailed in Greenwich Time is almost enough to make you throw a tea party.

We certainly don’t need to do a similar project for the fire department.

Greenwich employs far more police per 1,000 population than just about any other town in Connecticut, except for our crime-ridden big cities. We spend tens of millions on a sparkling new police HQ. Yet we can’t be bothered to build a second high school that is badly needed (Greenwich High School is the second biggest in the entire state, only slightly smaller that the public high school in economically depressed New Britain). We can’t even construct a new auditorium for that school, even though the one that’s there was too small decades ago when it was first built.

And what is this focus on arresting young people in this town? Why are scores of kids getting arrested for smoking pot, an offense that warrants no more than a ticket in neighboring Massachusetts? Why can we find all the money we need to employ police officers to arrest kids for pot, but we are scrimping on employing teachers, going over the top range for students per class at some schools?

Something is very wrong with our priorities in Greenwich.

I am certainly glad you appreciate the new building. It is, after all, the community’s not the police department’s. As the police department’s liaison to the building project, I’ve spent the better part of the last four years endeavoring to ensure the building was worth the Town’s investment.

I am sorry you were left with certain misconceptions. For the record, please allow me to put forth the following:

1) All six countertops integral to the building are plastic laminate over wood (like traditional Formica.) All other countertops, work surfaces and desktops (even the Chief’s) are of similar construction (plastic laminate over wood.) All of the furniture in the building is the mid-grade modular Steelcase office furniture that has been established as the Town’s municipal standard. This is the same grade, type and manufacture of office furniture found in other municipal buildings like Town Hall.

There is not a single piece of marble anything in the new facility – to include countertops. The only thing close are the walls in the public lobby and some areas of the exterior facade that are polished granite to a height of about four feet. This material was selected to render the building’s appearance consistent with the existing 1938 Fire/Police building and for its durability, ease of maintenance and low cost. So was the polished cinderblock used in every hallway, elevator lobby and all the rooms and offices that do not have traditional sheetrock walls. Unfinished block and painted drywall hardly seems lavish.

2) The dormitory space is vital to our operations, especially during emergencies and weather events. When we are required to order officers to stay for double shifts with only eight hours off between sixteen hour work periods, we need to be able to provide them somewhere to rest. Many officers live 45 minutes to over an hour away and eight hours is just not enough time to commute both ways, perhaps grab a meal and get adequate sleep. Especially during emergencies, we need our personnel to be well rested to maximize safety and efficiency.

The dormitory is three connecting rooms that provide sleeping accommodations for 14 employees (a typical patrol shift) and totals about 1,080 square feet – around the size of a typical two-bedroom apartment. You might “certainly like to live” in a two-bedroom apartment with 13 other people. I can’t say I relish the thought.

3) The new building is outfitted with 13 adult detention cells – the exact same number of adult cells as were in the 1938 Fire/Police building. The four additional cells are two youth cells (we had no youth holding facilities in the former building), a handicapped-accessible cell (required in a new public building by the ADA) and a single, large communal temporary holding cell in our prisoner processing area. We have had access to the same number of adult detention cells for over 70 years. I am not aware of it being an issue to date.

4) Relative to your observation the building is outfitted with “very well accomplished wood finishes including trimwork that I could easily say is the best of the best,” thanks for the compliment. You certainly can’t consider wood to be an exotic building material. That the municipality hired skilled workers who were required to meet an exacting standard of craftsmanship can’t be a bad thing for taxpayers, can it?

5) The building is far from too large. It was constructed to meet our needs for fifty years. In fact, at 53,000 square feet, it is 10,000 square feet smaller than was recommended when the initial studies were conducted at the start of the project in the early 1990′s.

6) The Town did not own all of the land involved. If you recall, the Town was required to purchase and raze the former “Judy’s Nails” building on Mason Street to make adequate space available. You can’t really be surprised that it cost more per square foot to construct a large building with an attached 167-vehicle parking structure in the heart of downtown Greenwich than it did to build a similar one with surface parking on a vacant lot in an industrual section of South Norwalk. The fact of the matter is that the building project was finished on budget and ahead of schedule. I can’t imagine the Town wanting more than that.

I any event, I am glad you enjoyed your tour. Feel free to stop by again anytime. Usually we have to drag our guests down here kicking and screaming … literally.

Respectfully,

Lt. Mark Kordick
Administrative Lieutenant
Greenwich Police Department

As for your comments about building. What I don;t understand is the acceptance of high costs. Certainly, in a Town where one can find $20 million dollar personal homes, we can get a bit desensitized to the dollars. Additionally, if there can be a splashy addition to the High School, or the Fire Station, or Witherall, or any other edifice – without a tax increase – many citizens just focus on the results and not the means to get there. Literally every project we have undertaken over the past few decades has been overbudget, and corners still cut (see Ham Av). The whole perceived problem with the High School auditorium started with a cutback in the 1969 construction.

If we were demonstrably unsafe, certainly we should consider a fire station. But absent that proof, and I’ve seen no person make that argument, we need to marshall our dwindling resources for capital projects in the unsexy realm of drainage, flooding, schools, roads etc, IMHO.

As far as Jim Lash, I always admired his ability to achieve things by force of will and conviction. But he was attacked in quite a bipartisan fashion at the time for the projects, and not just by me.