MAPLETON, Utah County — Plans are under review for a new public safety building to serve Mapleton's police, ambulance and volunteer fire department.
The building is to go up where the old, empty police station now sits just south of Central Bank near City Hall. The city also purchased an old house next to it. Construction crews plan to raze both buildings to make way for the new public safety building, Police Chief Dean Pettersson said.
Plans for the new building will go before the City Council later this summer and then be put out for bid, Pettersson said. The building would serve a police force of eight, plus three reserve officers, with volunteer ambulance personnel and firefighters.
The police department is now located in cramped quarters in the basement of City Hall, and the fire trucks and ambulance are housed in an old building nearby on Main Street. Once the new building is complete, the recreation department will get more space in those older buildings, Mayor Brian Wall said.
The city bid the project last year but didn't move forward on it because it lacked the funds. Bids then came in between $1.7 million and $2.1 million. Wall said he's hoping the next bids won't be much different.
"People are hungry, so we hope we'll have a deal," he said.
Some of the funding is coming from money recently freed up with an $8.7 million Central Utah Project reimbursement grant, with a 35 percent match for a pressurized irrigation pond to be built on the side of Maple Mountain where a defunct reservoir now sits, Wall said.
A change in the law allows the city to count irrigation work already done, including dry pipes developers have put in the ground for future growth, as part of the city's match, he said.
That coupled with impact fees and other savings should make it possible to build the public safety building without bonding for it, officials said.
Meanwhile, engineering for the pond also is under way, Wall said.
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