NEWBURYPORT — Drab and graying cement floors inside the Newburyport Police Department now have that freshly painted look after the department has been spending the last few months repainting them with a green-colored industrial strength epoxy.
The decision to perform the work came after state inspectors visited the station this spring for an unannounced tour of the Green Street facility and recommended the department resurface the cement floors in its 10 jail cells, according to City Marshal Thomas Howard.
Howard said he decided to take the recommendation one step further and rehab all the cement floors in the building. The project began shortly after the state inspection and is expected to be completed today or tomorrow as the last section painted, the department's sally port, should be ready for use.
The final bill for the project came to $2,485 and is being funded through the department's building maintenance budget. Howard said this is the first time since the station was built roughly 14 years ago that the cement floors have been repainted.
"This is like night and day," Howard said.
For at least the last few days, items in rooms being repainted were stored inside a portable container unit parked on Green Street near the department's garage bay doors. Each room takes about three days to complete: one day to clean, another to paint and a third to dry and return items to their rightful places.
The contractor hired for the job was Samarra Painting of Newburyport. Mindy Maus, one of two painters working inside the sally port yesterday, said the department's cement floors had been worn past the point where cleaning them would make a difference.
Howard agreed: "To me, the floors looked dirty, no matter how many times we cleaned them."
Asked how long the new epoxy would last, Maus said it depended on the amount of traffic they experienced. The epoxy in the sally port for example, she said, wouldn't last as long as the epoxy elsewhere because the sally port is subjected to the weight of police cruisers and prone to car-related spills and leaks.
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