Location, Location, Location - Editorial
Debate over where to site Bourne’s new fire station south of the Cape Cod Canal has been such a significant topic over the years that it truly is starting to feel like the plot of “Groundhog Day.” It has been six years now, and the town is virtually no closer to breaking ground on a new station than it was in 2017, when the committee was formed. At this point, it is hard not to think of the quandary as an almost comical part of the town’s modern lore—round, round, round we go, when it will stop, nobody knows!
The millions of townies who live in the thousands of small municipalities and towns across the country will surely confirm this phenomenon: that each area has its own culture, and with that culture comes local lore. And by “local lore,” we simply mean that the topic has become such a significant and long-standing staple of our news coverage of Bourne that it is starting to feel like the question of “Where should the fire station be sited?” was, unbeknownst to us, a rhetorical one.
Bourne has a few of these municipal conundrums—the historic information booth, among other historic preservation efforts, was a consistent topic, but that has finally been moved; the redesign of the town seal is another; yet that, too, seems to at least be on the precipice of making something happen.
Typically, though, these unsolved problems and unanswered questions regarding grand but ambiguous concepts—like siting a new fire station somewhere south of the canal—hang around the town for years on end, being constantly discussed and reported back on without ever actually making progress toward a tangible solution.
The actual functionality of town governments can be easily overshadowed when the big topic questions are danced around and passed over with what feels like as little effort or foresight as possible. It is draining for the residents, and must be even more so for the volunteer members of the town’s committee tasked with figuring it out.
We checked our online archives, and the same fatigue was evident as far back as October 2017, at which time the feasibility committee charged with getting the ball rolling on the station was fully revamped. At the time, Fire Chief Norman P. Sylvester of Bourne’s Fire Department said that the much needed building replacements of both the Monument Beach and Pocasset facilities had been on the department’s radar “for years.”
“They just haven’t seen any love in years,” he said then.
Now going on seven years later, they still haven’t.
Believe it or not, there was an even earlier iteration of the south-side fire station feasibility committee a whole 10 years prior—but this committee’s “work” from the mid-to-late aughts amounted, essentially, to nothing.
At this point, Bourne is a solid 15 years into the discussion of where, when and how to site a new fire station on the south side of the canal. And we hope—for the sake of sanity for all those involved—that some progress is made on the project before another 15 years slip by.