AUBURN — The men and women who work out of the Androscoggin County building say they are losing patience.

As they watch surrounding cities build new public safety facilities, the sheriff’s office remains stuck in a building that’s 170 years old and rife with problems, including leaking sewage, rampant mold and runaway asbestos.

There was a glimmer of hope in 2022 when the county purchased the former Evergreen Subaru building in Auburn for $4.5 million as a potential new home for the sheriff’s office.

But so far, after spending $200,000 on surveys and engineering designs, the county commission has balked at moving forward with the plan, rejecting last year a proposed $29 million bond to renovate the building at 774 Center St. as too expensive for taxpayers.

Last month, the majority of county commissioners again declared that the project, at the lower cost of $26 million, was just too high.

With that in mind, the county workers union last week issued a statement criticizing the commission for its lack of urgency in getting those workers out of conditions they deem cramped and unsafe.

“Going on over five years looking for an appropriate workplace with little to no movement since its initial plan,” the Androscoggin County Employee’s Association wrote in a statement on the matter, “it’s starting to feel as if this effort will be prolonged indefinitely.”

And while breaking down the many delays that have kept them stuck in a crumbling, 170-year-old building, the union couldn’t help but notice what their neighbors are doing.

“Androscoggin County deputies have been in the same building since 1857,” according to the statement, signed by ACEA president and sheriff’s deputy Connor Pinkham. “That is 154 years longer than the Auburn Police Department’s current headquarters and 129 years longer than Lewiston police were located at 171 Park St.” in Lewiston.

In 2023, the city of Auburn approved a $45 million, 30-year bond for a new public safety building. Auburn police had only been in their building since 2011.

In Lewiston, meanwhile, the city just last year built a new police department on a lease plan, moving the department out of a building that had been built in 1986.

The union noted that the original plan to relocate the sheriff’s department to the former Evergreen Subaru building would have resulted in a tax increase of between $11 and $16 per $100,000 of property value, a cost some county commissioners have deemed too high.

Not all commissioners are against the idea of spending the funds to move the sheriff’s department into newer, cleaner and safer surroundings.

Commissioner Roland Poirier, of Lewiston, said they should move forward and allow taxpayers to vote on the project at 774 Center St.​ ​He and three others agreed that the commission has been “kicking the can down the road” for too long.

Commissioner Garrett Mason, on the other hand, suggested selling ​t​he Subaru building and putting the proceeds into a county reserve​ fund. Those funds could be used, Mason said, to renovate the existing county building​.

For the people who spend the bulk of their work days in the fungus-plagued county building, it’s been one step forward and one step back.

“There is no path forward,” according to the union statement, “more than five years after this process began.”

It’s not just about the poor safety and health conditions that exist at the current county building, proponents of the move say. It’s also about growth — the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department is presently occupying about 9,000 square feet of space where surveys have shown that they require 22,000.

“So, while the working conditions are less then desirable, the need for space the county building doesn’t have the capacity for is a huge and overlooked concern,” Androscoggin County Sheriff Eric Samson said.

The union, in its statement, say the voters of Androscoggin County should decide the matter by putting a bond on the ballot.

The issue will next be discussed when the commission meets again on April 15. In the meantime, the union urged the people of Androscoggin County to talk the matter over with their district’s commissioner.

The time to get employees out of the decrepit old building and into something newer and cleaner, they say, is sooner rather than later.

Many of the county commissioners have not personally toured the county building to see what conditions are like, said Samson.

“The employees deserve better,” he said, “and so does the public.”