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Canfield Council awards contractor for police department expansion
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
City council has unanimously approved a contractor to build a police department addition.
Council hired Brock Builders Inc. of Boardman for an amount not to exceed $478,690 to build the 3,500-square-foot expansion.
DPH Architecture of Canfield is the architect on the project. Councilman Chuck Tieche said at Wednesday’s meeting that the project had been estimated at $500,000.
The addition was approved in March when the city restructured debt at Red Gate Farm to lower the interest rate. The new loan, through Farmers National Bank, was an eight-year $1.1 million loan, with the current debt at the farm of about $602,000 at that time.
The rest of the loan, $500,000, was for the expansion. The farm sits at state Route 62 and Leffingwell Road and was purchased in 2003 for $2.3 million, with a $1 million down payment.
The city has paid more than $1.69 million toward the debt. Annual payments of about $162,000, including both the principal and interest, have been made since refinancing the loan in 2011.
The new loan dropped that payment $10,000 a year while dropping the annual interest rate 0.73 percentage points to 2.92 percent.
The department expansion was previously approved by council in 2001, but stopped after the economy took a hit after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
City officials have said the city’s information-technologies department is in a closet with $500,000 worth of equipment crammed in, on top of officers being added over the years. There are also space issues with longer periods needed for evidence storage, Canfield Police Chief Chuck Colucci has said.
Both of those would have space in an unfinished basement in the expansion.
“We’re at a point right now where we can’t risk the existing infrastructure, which contains a lot of public records,” Colucci said. “We’re not talking about just police public records – we’re talking about city, water, income tax, street department [and] zoning. This is the system that runs the city, not just the police department.”
It’s to be a 180-day construction project, and officials hope the building is under roof before winter weather arrives. The work would also include repairs to the existing building.
In other action, city council unanimously approved contract adjustments on the close-out of the East Main Street sidewalk project. City manager Joe Warino said that meant a savings of $6,250.10 for the city.
City officials have also been looking over changes to its breed specific language within its dangerous dog ordinance. The specific change would be to remove a ban on pit bulls in the city.
“We hope to have it on the agenda next meeting,” Warino said.