Torrington officials outline $millions in repairs, weigh new public-safety complex

Torrington officials on Feb. 5 released facility-condition assessments showing urgent and long-term repair needs at the city’s police department, fire headquarters and North End fire station, and discussed using planning funds and a building committee to study a combined public-safety complex.

Facilities Manager Jamie Sikora told the Board of Public Safety that Silver Petrucelli & Associates rated building needs on a 1–4 scale and flagged immediate (priority 1) and near-term (priority 2) repairs. “If you look at just the totals alone for the major upgrades of what they say is urgent priority, we’re at, based on two-year-old data, $680,000 just to get the basics fixed,” Sikora said. He added that priority-2 items push the police building’s needs to about $7.2 million and that, overall, bringing the police building to baseline could cost roughly $10 million.

The report described multiple problems at the police department: sidewalks and access routes not meeting current ADA requirements; many interior door knobs that are not ADA‑compliant; an obsolete key system for which replacement parts are no longer manufactured; corroding original water piping that requires replacement; and extensive, aging HVAC components. Sikora said about 60% of the ductwork needs cleaning or replacement and several heat pumps date to 1989.

Sikora said the fire headquarters (constructed c. 1979–1980) has an elevator with an outdated relay system needing an estimated six-figure upgrade, plumbing lateral sizing and grease-trap issues, and living‑quarters layout problems as the department adapts to a more diverse workforce. He estimated roughly $700,000 to address priority‑1 items at the fire headquarters and said the full building upgrades could total in the millions.

The North End fire station (built 1958) shows major ventilation problems, reliance on window units in bunks, outdated electrical capacity requiring a full electrical upgrade, extensive brick repointing and a roof replacement within roughly five years. Sikora provided an estimate for the North End building in the tens of millions, and said combined minimum needs across the three sites were “$15,000,000 minimum” based on the assessment figures.

Mayor Eleanor Carbone and commissioners discussed next steps. Carbone and Commissioner McLeod said the city should form a building committee with representatives from police, fire, public works/facilities, the Board of Public Safety and the City Council, and include outside experts and members of the public. McLeod said ARPA funds could be used for early-stage work such as site selection and conceptual design and emphasized preparing to compete for CIF 2030 grant funding before that program’s 2030 expiration. “We really want to start doing this work, start pulling the information together so that we can prepare ourselves for that application,” McLeod said.

Chiefs Bill Baldwin (police) and Borden (fire) said they attended a conference with architects and planners to review modern public-safety complexes and shared lessons learned. Commissioners and staff noted the importance of projecting space needs decades into the future to avoid building facilities that quickly become too small. Sikora and other participants described visits to newer combined facilities that already face storage and layout challenges, underscoring the need to forecast 20–40 years when sizing a new complex.

The board agreed to schedule meetings with subject-matter experts, to draft a proposal for a building committee and site-selection process, and to seek ARPA or other planning funds to complete conceptual design work and prepare grant applications.

Ending: City staff will return to the Board of Public Safety and the City Council with a proposed building-committee structure and scope for early planning work; no construction decision was made at the Feb. 5 meeting.