RETURN TO STATION

If the advocates for putting Bangor’s new police station on the edge of town think the debate about its location is over the soil bearing strengths of the competing sites, they haven’t been listening. A petition exists to put the new station downtown because that’s where people assume police headquarters belong and, with city councilors assuming the same thing, that’s where the city first looked for a site.

More specifically, the change to Maine Avenue out by the airport was a surprise and needed ample explanation. But councilors, rather than recognize that while they might have ab-sorbed the idea, many residents hadn’t, voted in favor of the new site after too-little discussion. Now a petition to stop them is circulating.

To counter it, the city’s architectural firm, WBRC, recently sent a set of talking points to councilors so they could discuss “the advantages of the airport site over the downtown site,” which is 240 Main St. Of course an architectural firm is going to focus on the architectural and engineering concerns of the sites, and no doubt the memo does a thorough job outlining why, because of space limitations, poor soils, an oil plume, limited traffic access and other reasons, the downtown site has drawbacks.

But before the memo was sent, a prime reason councilors rejected the Main Street site was because it was said to be too valuable as a commercial property to hold a public building. Either the site has been afflicted with a wicked case of urban blight in the last couple of weeks or councilors didn’t know the full story when they voted.

They shouldn’t be expected to know everything. It’s a part-time board (though it must feel full time to its members) whose only obligation is to make thoughtful decisions after careful consideration. But the police station will cost at least $6 million and should last a half-century or more; the question the petitioners raised was whether the city could take several more weeks to decide where to put it. It was a fair request and it was turned down.

The debate over the station needn’t be long and the petition needn’t lead to a citywide vote in November. If councilors would invite petition supporters to hold their collected signatures while the council reopened discussion on a downtown location, a lot of effort and acrimony could be avoided.

There’s a tight deadline for turning in the signatures, however, so the discussion would have to occur immediately. The questions it would cover include these: Is a downtown location just a longtime habit or are there real safety and wellbeing issues to be considered? Does a police station promote economic growth and, if so, where is the better place to promote it? What factors made the city look downtown first and are those factors worth the higher cost of building there?

Councilors may think they have the answers to these questions already, but the public doesn’t. And perhaps the councilors don’t either.