CONWAY — Conway Police Chief Kenneth Ouimette had a question for the visitors standing inside the town fire station.
“So, I need to know. Ashfield or Conway. Which is worse?” he asked.
Having toured the cramped and antiquated Ashfield fire station 30 minutes before, and now having also gone through the cramped and antiquated Conway fire station, State Sen. Adam G. Hinds could only shrug that it was a toss-up.
“But I think your toilet might put me over the edge,” Hinds said.
“That was our winning hand,” Ouimette said as the room erupted in laughter.
Ashfield Fire’s restroom is situated in a former closet in the back of the station, and much of the space is taken up by a giant water heater. But it has a door.
Over at the Conway station, the restroom is in a space that looks like it used to be a hallway. There’s a toilet, a sink, and a paper towel dispenser, but the doorway leading to the back of the fire garage has no door. Fortunately for volunteer firefighters with privacy concerns, when the fire trucks are parked in the garage, there’s not a lot of room for people to be moving around back near the bathroom door.
State Rep. Natalie Blais, D-Sunderland, said the takeaway from the tour should not be that one facility is worse than the other, but that both are pretty bad.
What’s more, she said, is that the conditions in Ashfield and Conway are not unique to public safety facilities in small towns across Massachusetts.
“Nearly all of our small towns have public safety facilities just like this,” she said.
Blais and Hinds, D-Pittsfield, hosted Monday’s tour. Joining them were state Auditor Suzanne M. Bump and state Rep. Carlos González, D-Springfield, who is also chairman of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security.
Bump said conditions were even worse than she expected.
“I’ve reported on these conditions (and) I’ve read about them. To actually see them puts a whole another impact behind it,” she said.
Bump’s office in October published a report detailing that Massachusetts has critically underfunded communities through the Chapter 90 highway program by distributing money based primarily on population. Smaller towns like Ashfield and Conway, which have populations of less than 1,800 people, find themselves unable to keep up with the cost of equipment, maintenance and new facilities for their police and fire departments.
The report, titled “Public Infrastructure in Western Massachusetts: A Critical Need for Regional Investment and Revitalization,” calls upon the state to increase funding to rural communities by $300 million annually, to invest in expanding access to broadband internet, and to create a public building authority that would help small towns finance new facilities.
The public building authority, Bump said, would mirror the existing Massachusetts School Building Authority, a quasi-independent government agency that helps communities finance the cost of new schools. The agency reimburses communities for the cost of design and construction of school facilities based on the overall income, wealth and poverty in communities.
Since then, bills have been introduced in both the state House and Senate calling for the creation of a municipal and public safety building authority, including one proposed by Blais.
Hinds and Blais each said many legislators from Greater Boston or urban areas have no idea what conditions for public safety are like in rural areas.
“It is one of those things that people need to see to understand,” Blais said. “This is a real problem.”
The conditions in Ashfield and Conway are similar to the police and fire departments in several of the smaller towns in Hampshire and Franklin counties, she said.
“This is how we roll. We do the best we can with what we got and we hold it together with duct tape,” she said. “But we need money.”
In Ashfield, the fire department has four vehicles packed into a three-bay garage next to Town Hall. Space inside the garage is single-file only and Fire Chief Kyle Walker says they need to pull a truck out front for any maintenance or cleaning.
The garage dates back as far as 1940 and has been expanded at least four times, he said. There is no exhaust ventilation system, and once one of the fire trucks is started, the interior fills with diesel fumes, he said.
“We open a window on that side and we open a window on that side,” he said.
Bump asked where the firefighters clean their equipment after it is exposed to hazardous materials.
“Right here,” he said. Trucks are moved out and equipment is cleaned on the garage floor, he said.
Firefighters who want to clean up after a fire can wash their hands in the bathroom sink, but that’s about it, Walker said. If they want to shower, they need to go home because the station has no shower, he said.
The Ashfield police station is in the basement of the 210-year-old Town Hall next to the fire station.
It consists of a cramped one-room office with her desk, a radio and a booking area. The closet serves as an evidence lockup.
“There’s no privacy for victims or witnesses,” Blais said.
In lieu of a holding cell, suspects are handcuffed to a metal rail just inside the front door.
Blais pointed out the handcuff and rail to González and told him what it was for. He exclaimed, “Oh my God!”
Down Route 116 in Conway, the fire station is in a former highway garage and the police station is an office on the second floor of Town Hall.
As in Ashfield, the fire trucks are squeezed into the garage, and they are so tall there is the smallest clearance between the top of the garage doorway, which commonly sets of the proximity alarms when trucks drive out the door, Fire Chief Robert Baker said.
Ouimette said he uses the police space for office work only. If he has someone in custody, he will drive the person to the Franklin County jail 15 miles away in Greenfield.
Conway Board of Selectman Chairman Philip Kantor said the town has a $6 million budget, but when you remove what is spent for education, they have less than $3 million for municipal government. This does not leave much for new projects.
“There is no fat on our bones,” he said.
He said it took 45 years to finance the construction of a new highway garage, which freed up space for the fire department.
Conway, like many small towns, has two streams of income: state aid and property taxes. There is little commercial or industrial property in town, leaving the entire tax burden on its residents. There is very little money available for long-term projects.
“We do what we can with what we have, but we can’t pay for what we need to do,” he said.
Ashfield Town Administrator Paul McLatchy III said the town has a $5 million budget.
Small towns have a different set of pressures compared to large cities when it comes to infrastructure and equipment purchases. Something as simple as buying a fire truck requires an investment of $500,000, which is a steep climb.
“How often do you see a large city spend 10% of their budget on a fire truck?” McLatchy said.
“Just because we’re a town of 1,700, it doesn’t mean we don’t have the same equipment needs.”
Walker said if Ashfield wanted to build a new fire station or even combined police and fire public safety complex, the cost would be as high as $6 million. The town recently borrowed $2.4 million to expand internet access.
Blais said this represents the “impossibly tough challenges” that rural communities have to grapple with that suburban or urban communities just do not understand.
“A new public safety building or the internet? They are both important,” she said.
González, as a Springfield representative, has been to the police and fire stations in that city many times. As chair of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, he has also been to many other public safety buildings.
But he said he never saw anything like what exists in Ashfield or Conway before. “It’s eye-opening,” he said.
“This is the first time that I’ve been somewhere where the police station doesn’t have a jail and the fire station doesn’t have a shower for the firefighters,” he said.
Bump said both towns are representative of what she called “the east-west divide” in Massachusetts. There is an inequity in funding statewide, and Western Massachusetts, particularly rural Western Massachusetts, often comes up on the short end.
“Just as rural communities need help to purchase computers, software and the internet for schools, they also need help making sure local police and fire departments have modern equipment and safe, usable facilities,” she said.
Ad Choices