Chelsea wants a new fire substation and owns no land to put it on. The candidate the administration likes best is a piece of Chelsea Jewish Lifecare’s property on Admirals Hill, offered by the nonprofit’s chief executive, and the architect’s estimate for a two-story, 10,000-square-foot station there is $6,079,260. The terms of the land have never been disclosed to the council.
How it got here
The council asked the administration to find a site in March 2025. The City Manager reported back in February that “since the City does not own any property that could accommodate a fire station, we have reached out to several property owners,” and that “very fruitful and positive conversations” with Barry Berman, CEO of Chelsea Jewish Lifecare, had established that a station would fit on the nonprofit’s Admirals Hill land. The Department of Public Works began preliminary design. Gorman Richardson Lewis Architects produced a draft estimate dated January 22: $6,079,260.
Chief Quatieri’s site report, attached to a March letter, scored three candidates: Captain’s Row, on the Chelsea Jewish Lifecare land, 53 points; Everett Avenue, 49; Marginal Street, 48. At the April 13 Public Safety subcommittee, councillors weighed Captain’s Row, donated but small, against Marginal Street, which the city would have to buy.
The open questions
The first is the land. “Donated” has appeared in the discussion, but no letter in the record says the parcel is a gift, a lease, a sale, or a swap, and a nonprofit that operates a nursing home and assisted living complex on the same hill has an obvious interest in a fire station next door, which is fine, and in the terms, which the council should see before it votes money. The second is response time. Admirals Hill is the eastern edge of the city, on a peninsula reached by two roads. A station there covers the hill and the waterfront well and the rest of the city less well; the chief’s scoring gave it the edge, but the report’s criteria were not published with it. The third is money. Six million dollars is a capital item in a year when the administration says free cash is falling to $5 million and the five-year forecast shows deficits from FY28.
Chelsea has needed a fourth engine company since the 2024 fires, and Engine 4 is running now out of the Sagamore Avenue station. Where it lives permanently is a decision worth a public hearing with the land terms on the table. Those terms have never been disclosed.