Residents vote on new sheriff’s building
By Stuart Hedstrom
Staff Writer
DOVER-FOXCROFT — On Tuesday, Nov. 3, county residents will be asked on the referendum ballot “Shall the county of Piscataquis issue General Obligations Bonds in a principal amount not to exceed Six Hundred Ten Thousand Dollars ($610,000) to finance a public improvement project consisting of the construction of a new Piscataquis Sheriff County Sheriff’s Office building located at the intersection of East Main Street and School in Dover-Foxcroft, including design work and all other expenses reasonably related thereto?”
“The $610,000 not only includes construction of the building itself, but furnishings and design work,” Interim County Manager Tom Lizotte said during a Sept. 24 public hearing at the Morton Avenue Municipal Building — the second of three such sessions held across the county. At an estimated 3 percent interest rate and an assumed 10-year term to maturity, the interest cost would be $105,083 for a $715,083 project.
“We don’t have any long-term debt in Piscataquis County,” Lizotte said about the county government, mentioning the jail was paid off in 2007. In 1999 the county purchased a parcel of land on the east side of School Street, with the idea this property could be used as the site of a future building.
Lizotte said the current home of the sheriff’s department, adjacent to the jail and on the same campus as the courthouse and other county offices, was constructed in 1886 to serve as living quarters for the sheriff and family and was not built to serve as office space. He described the facility as “an antiquated, obsolete building that really no longer functions 129 years after it was constructed.”
Sheriff John Goggin said in the 1980s the Department of Corrections came and looked at the what was then an outdated jail. He said the expenses to transport and house inmates elsewhere in the state would have been greater than the costs of a new facility, “So we went out to a bond issue, it passed, it got built in 1987 and it opened in 1987.”
“But the sheriff’s department in the old apartment, they took an area that was not fit for a sheriff’s department and made it smaller and it made our sheriff’s department so obsolete and so crowded,” Goggin said. “I’m still very proud of our jail because we have taken good care of our jail, it’s still in good standing.”
The sheriff said presently five officers work in four cubicles. “There is no place to take anyone who comes in to sit down and talk confidentially,” Goggin said, instead these interviews take place over in the courthouse. “We have absolutely no place for evidence lockers,” he added, with these items stored in either the cellar or on the second floor.
Goggin said the stairways leading to the cellar are dangerous, and there is also a constant hazard from falling ice outside. “I can’t overemphasize how archaic some of this stuff is,” he said, saying he has been working in the building for over four decades and “it hasn’t changed a bit.”
“Look the place over and ask yourself if you would place yourself or your family in a working place like this,” he said.
Goggin said if a new sheriff’s complex is built, then the existing space would be converted into storage and some offices for jail personnel.
Lizotte said Goggin has been saying there is a need for a new sheriff’s office building for the last decade. “This project has really been moving forward because of the leadership he has been getting from the commissioners,” Lizotte said, saying Commissioner James White began in January and soon after saw the conditions of the facility firsthand.
“This time it really hit home how bad it really was and we decided to take a look at that,” Commissioners Chair Fred Trask said. He said an architect was hired to look out for the county’s interests during the state’s construction of a new courthouse and the commissioners thought “maybe we ought to have some preliminary drawings done” for the sheriff’s department.
The first estimate of a new building presented was around $676,000, and then with some work planned to be done by inmates at the Charleston Correctional facility the cost was lowered to the present figure of $610,000. “That’s quite a savings, we hope,” Trask said.
Commissioner Jim Annis said he had heard of the movement to build a new sheriff’s building “but being the conservative I am, I said we would make do.” He added that upon seeing the facility, “I came away thinking this has got to change.”
“Everything I saw was against what I felt was the right thing to do,” Annis said.
“It’s not designed for what it’s being used for,” White said, saying he wanted to credit the sheriff’s department employees for being able to work as well as they have there over the years. “It’s definitely a necessity” he said about a new building, which he said will be built with “as reasonable construction costs as we could hope for.”
Lizotte said the proposed building is one story, with about 3,000 square feet for conference and office space as well as a two-bay garage. “It is a very functional, efficient building that would blend in with the neighborhood.”
He said if voters approve the financing on the Nov. 3 ballot, architectural work would be bid out and a project manager would be found. The project, which would be brought before the Dover-Foxcroft Planning Board, would go out to bid in February or March.
“We could start in April and by this time in 2016 we could have have a building the sheriff’s department could move into,” Lizotte said. When asked, he said local subcontractors and materials purchased from area businesses would be used whenever possible.
Lizotte said if voters turn down the request at the polls, one possibility may be to start a capital improvement fund but these monies would either come out of the county budget or lead to an increase in this spending plan depending how much is earmarked for the building.
“We really will be negligent if we don’t do what we need to do,” White said, saying the plan for a sheriff’s office building is very fiscally responsible.