COMMUNITY POLICING

With development at Bangor’s waterfront arriving slowly, the recent groundbreaking

of the city’s new police station, just up the street from the waterfront, was a positive and important event for Bangor. It was doubly so because city officials at one time resisted siting the station at this pivotal spot.

The new station, near the corner of Main and Cedar streets, is expected to be completed next fall and will include 40,000 square feet of working space.

The cost to build the station is $8 million, considerably higher than an earlier plan in which the city would rehab a vacant building out near the airport for use as a new station. A vote by the public last fall rejected that idea in favor of keeping the station downtown.

Rather than reacting badly to the ballot-box rebuke, city officials instead got to work and last week held a groundbreaking ceremony for ground that is already well broken – the actual work had already begun – and invited one of the leaders of the citizen’s initiative to speak.

Suzanne Kelly, a defender of the city’s historic architecture and its downtown, said the station “represents the value we place on the security and safety of those who walk and work and gather in this exciting part of our city, where so much is unfolding.” More, certainly, will be unfolding as the city encourages the renewal of the waterfront, which is the source of the city’s founding and its early prosperity.

At the ceremony the other day, Police Chief Don Winslow joked that he was told he was beginning his career with the department at a fortuitous time because Bangor was about to build a new station. That was in 1979.

No one is going to accuse Bangor of being hasty with this decision, and while there was disagreement along the way, the long-awaited station is now being constructed, connecting its downtown to its origin and economic hope for the future.