Join the Fight: Stop the Police Headquarters from Occupying Old Town Hall

Hamden resident Michele Helou has 15 years of architectural design experience. She does green building and building energy consulting and is a resident elect to Hamden’s Building Committee. She’s also quite upset:

[A]t last week’s Town Building Committee meeting … the architectural team presented its directive [on the new police headquarters] from an apparent closed-door process—an expensive and reckless plan to destroy two lovely historic buildings in Hamden’s town center and compromise the architectural character and public purpose of Memorial Town Hall with an impressively offensive and massive addition … [and] ... a vast 200-space parking garage, partially shielded by a pedestrian-cruel 200-foot-long pile of dirt ….

Helou was most offended because the plan, which attempts to combine the renovation of Memorial Town Hall with the construction of a new police headquarters will serve neither function well:

There are many good solutions for a new and even better, more expeditiously built police station. Combine it with the new fire station planned for the Dadio Farm on Putnam Avenue as a state-of-the-art emergency response center. Move police headquarters into Government Center and town offices into, well, Town Hall. Or build a nice new police headquarters in a place where town center traffic and resulting lower emergency-response times will not be a concern.

Restoring our Town Hall and other historic buildings in town center could be done creatively and affordably with historic restoration grants and volunteer labor in small steps that will not trigger expensive code updates. Town Hall rightfully belongs to the law-abiding people of Hamden (although the unlawful will be quite cozy in over 20 new jail cells planned for the new headquarters).

Instead of just letter writing, Helou has started a campaign to stop the project by creating a petition to stop bad and expensive building in Hamden.

As this is a tax issue (who do you think’s gonna foot the bill?) in addition to being a quality of life issue, I urge you to join Michele in the fight and sign her petitions. After all, as Michele points out, even though “[e]veryone at the table will say the police station is a done deal and that the work of the last three months of planning and design is irreversible. Hogwash! Architects, engineers and planners work on projects all the time that never get built because of finances, feasibility questions, code requirements or public protests.”