The mayor of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, says he's commissioning a feasibility study of turning a recently shuttered elementary school into a new police station.
Mayor Peter Marchetti said the study will determine how realistic it is for the former Morningside Community School building to accommodate the needs of Berkshire County's largest police department, currently housed in a decrepit building in the heart of the city.
"Do we have the logistics to put a communication center there?" Marchetti said. "All the other pieces that we need, can it happen? And so, can we just find out if it's feasible and what that cost is? If it comes back that it's going to be $75 million to build, the city and myself may not have that appetite to bring it forward. If it's $20 million, it's an opportunity to kind of really refocus on a new and improved building. We all, I think, can agree that the inside of the police station is well past repair, and so it would be easier to take that open space plan at Morningside and develop into police station."
Despite outcry from some members of the school community, Pittsfield Public Schools Superintendent Latifah Phillips framed the closure as unavoidable given Morningside's student performance and building inadequacies.
