About 300 residents at this year’s Town Meeting, held last week, got a first look at four possible relocation and con struction scenarios for several town departments, presented by Kenneth J. Buckland, principal at the Boston planning and design consulting firm The Cecil Group.
The scenarios are roughly estimated to cost in the range of $10 million to $15 million, Buckland said.
“What we’ve been doing lately in the last few months is these alternative scenarios,’’ he said at Town Meeting. “And this is the fun part, because this is where we start to act like a chessmaster and start to move the pieces around, because if we move one department in one location, we’re going to be moving another one to another location.’’
Studies were conducted on the former Bradstreet School building, the former Police Department building, the Fire Department headquarters, and the Division of Public Works building, to determine whether they would be viable options to solve the space needs of the school department administrative offices, community development, DPW, senior center, North Andover Thrift Shop, and Fire Department. All the buildings studied are located on Main Street, except for the DPW, which is on Osgood Street.
Among the findings of the consulting group is that the town does not need a new school building, based on a study of enrollment figures, Buckland said, adding that discussions on class sizes and the distribution of students will be ongoing when new enrollment figures come out in the fall.
A common thread among the handful of relocation options presented to residents at Town Meeting was that the town must stop leasing office space at 1600 Osgood St. for the school department administration and the Community Development Division. The school department lease there ends next year, while community development’s ends in 2016, according to the Cecil study.
