The former fire house on Second Street in downtown Hallowell is seen in August 2022. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal file

HALLOWELL — The City Council voted to seek proposals to renovate the Second Street fire station during its meeting Monday, a major step in the future of the historic building and the hundreds of fire department artifacts inside.

The city’s request for proposals, or RFP, asks for bids that would preserve the historic nature of the building — including a museum inside — and keep the Hallowell Food Pantry in the basement of the building. The station was built in 1828 and was used as town hall until 1899 and as the fire department until 2018. The building is now listed on the National Register of Historic Buildings.

The future of the station has been uncertain for years. After an unsuccessful attempt to offload the building in 2020, Hallowell residents widely supported a nonbinding referendum in 2022 for the city to keep and renovate the building.

But since that vote, city officials have concluded that renovating the building on the city’s dime would be very expensive: in the range of $5 million. That amount, Mayor George Lapointe said in a July council meeting, was simply too high for city officials to justify in the midst of ongoing budget struggles.

City Manager Gary Lamb has worked on the RFP since this past fall, when the council briefly considered a draft version of the document but delayed action.

Lapointe said Monday he was encouraged to see the process moving forward after three years of delay, and that he hoped to hear comments from residents over the next several months.

“I’m in no rush to do this, but I want to keep it moving,” he said. “If it takes some discussions with people and some extra time, I don’t mind that. But what we want here is not for this to be put on the back shelf for three years, like it has been in the past.”

In fact, the Second Street building has been on the shelf for longer than that. Former Mayor Mark Walker, who left office in 2021, said he promised in one of his inaugural addresses to solve the fire station issue by the end of his term.

“Clearly, I failed,” Walker said, chuckling. “I believe Mayor (Charlotte) Warren said the same thing, so I’m not the first to try to dispose of the old fire station.”

Walker spoke to the council Monday on behalf of the Hallowell Citizens’ Initiative, a volunteer group hoping to secure a space for the 500-plus fire department artifacts stored in the building’s upstairs meeting room. These artifacts, owned by the city and inventoried by the group about a decade ago, range from a 20-foot sign for the Hallowell Fire Department to early 19th-century water buckets to medals won by the department over the years.

Those artifacts could be in jeopardy of losing their storage space if the building is sold and renovated; the RFP asks for bids that include a museum and reserved space for the Hallowell Food Pantry, but stops short of requiring them. Ward 3 Councilor Benjamin Gagnon said elected officials would need to have a “hard conversation” about selling the building if none of the bids included space for a museum and the food pantry.

Regardless of the fate of the station, Walker said city officials should plan to have a storage plan for the valuable artifacts.

“The simplest way to look at this is, have a plan,” he said. “You’ve got to have a plan to move these artifacts, find a safe and secure place and how you’re going to store them. Some of them are heavy and difficult to move, some of them are quite old, and they have to be stored securely, both from a safety factor, but also so that it’s not harmed by how it’s stored.”

The RFP asks for bids to be submitted by April 25. A winning proposal could be chosen as early as the City Council’s May meeting.