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HINSDALE, N.H. -- Members of the Hinsdale Police building committee met with the Board of Selectmen on Monday to discuss the site it recommends for the new structure -- near the current spot.
Committee Chairman Peter Zavorotny led a discussion and said his team looked at five locations and believes the new police headquarters would be best suited in close proximity to where the current structure sits. He told the Reformer the present site makes the most sense from a financial and logistical standpoint.
Zavorotny said the selectmen, as part of the next stop, will look into hiring an architect to design the new building. He said the police have been operating in a farmhouse for more than two decades.
The police building committee is made up of Zavorotny, Vice Chairman and Hinsdale Senior Patrolman Mike Bomba, Joe Conroy, Chris Roberts, Katherine Cunningham, Jeanna Major (representative to Hinsdale Middle/High School), and Selectmen Mike Darcy and Richard Schill. Zavorotny also said Town Administrator Jill Collins takes minutes at the committee's meetings and acts as a liaison to the Board of Selectmen.
Zavorotny said the selectmen did not have much to say on Monday as they were all pretty up to date on the issue.
Selectman Jay Ebbighausen told the Reformer requests for qualification will be sent out and an architect will hopefully be chosen by mid-October. An RFQ is a call by a governmental entity for
"(The meeting) went fine," he said. "Everyone was pretty much on the same page."
One of the sites considered for the new building was along Route 119, near the schools. But Ebbighausen said there was some pushback to that idea.
Schill, who tends to be a conservative selectman, agrees a new station must be built but wants to be sensitive to the town's taxpayers.
"We need a new PD and we need it now. There's no question," he said at the joint meeting of the Board of Selectmen and the building committee in March. He suggested the one in Swanzey be looked at. "I am still a big proponent of building it."
At the meeting in March, Bomba gave the selectmen a run-down of how the new structure could be laid out.
Among the other details he gave, he said the interview room would be closer to the front of the building and next to a 6-foot by 10-foot computer lab. He said the two rooms are positioned near each other because they are both very quiet and controlled.
He also said the department wants to put lockers into the wall between the evidence and booking areas.
"Anything is better than what we have," Bomba later said.
At Hinsdale's 2011 Town Meeting, voters appropriated $25,000 into a Capital Reserve Fund in order to construct a new station by a 103 to 15 margin.
The Reformer reported in 2011 that a townwide questionnaire indicated that 11 percent of the town's 314 residents thought the current location was excellent. Nearly 200 rated its condition as fair or poor, more than 60 percent supported the idea of building a new structure and more than a third in favor of a downtown location.
