NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - The North Adams public safety building was built in 1955, and has outlived its usable life, and the city is working towards building a new one. 

The issues start front and center at the entrance of the police department.

"This is the main entrance to the police department, and it is not accessible,” said North Adams mayor Tom Bernard, standing on the department’s front steps. “And if you look at the area around the department, it would be particularly challenging, if not impossible, to make this entrance accessible."

Inside the department, the main issue is a lack of space. There's only room for a few desks in the main work area, and around the corner, more work stations are crammed together along a wall.

"All in a fairly tight space, so you can imagine a time when multiples of these could be used at the same time, as would be the administrative or the staff area,” said Bernard. “There's a tightness because of the nature of the work."

Things look a little better next door at the fire department, but it's because several renovations became necessary a couple of years ago.

"This ceiling, two years ago, was covered by a blue tarp that was going out those windows to drain the water that was leaking in,” said Bernard, now standing in the fire department’s gym on the second floor. “So you imagine this room as a multi-purpose fitness training room, and it's unusable."

Downstairs in the engine bay, there's evidence of the building's structural deficiencies, like cracks in the walls and the floor.

Progress is being made on a new building. The city is close to naming finalists for the new site, and now needs the state to release $1.2 million in funding which has been set aside for the project.

"We've done the work that we need to do to move this conversation forward,” said Bernard. “What we need now is to unlock this $1.2 million, which will let us take it to the next level and do real deep-dive analysis into a couple of sites and make the determination."