SCITUATE — On a June day last year, Governor Gina Raimondo joined a line of smiling town officials beside a dumped pile of sand for the ceremonial groundbreaking of a new police station here.

But before the first shovel blade plunged into the photo op, partisan bickering over the project had already resumed.

The town’s Republican leadership “tormented me for inviting Governor Raimondo,” a Democrat, to the celebration, says John Mahoney, at the time the Town Council president and one of the board’s four “Independent Men” who rode into office in 2016 in Trump fashion, promising to drain swamps of political stagnation.

“I said to them, ‘She holds the keys to the kingdom and you don’t want me to invite her to the groundbreaking?’ I mean, who’s that ignorant?”

So much for auspicious beginnings.

Sixteen months later, town voters have booted out Mahoney and the Independent Men who controlled the council. The police station — which Mahoney spoke of as a symbol of nonpartisan cooperation — is only half complete, racked by code deficiencies and a hot conduit for social media criticism.

The state Department of Labor and Training is investigating whether tradesmen were properly paid the prevailing wage.

And Mahoney, a contractor who served as the project’s supervisor, is defending the work of subcontractors he and a building committee hired against what he calls political attacks by the town’s Republican oligarchy.

“Everything that they say is deficient [in the building] is inaccurate, completely fabricated,” Mahoney says.

OK, “maybe there’s a little bit of truth in there that they twist around to make me look bad,” says Mahoney. “But there’s two sides to every story. This is just politics as usual in Scituate.”

A private consulting company indeed found deficiencies in the building, which was only about 40% completed when Mahoney lost his reelection bid last fall and the project came to a grinding halt.

Hired by the new all-Republican Town Council that took over in January, Municipal Code Consulting, of Needham, Massachusetts, issued a report in March that listed numerous structural and architectural shortcomings, along with mechanical and plumbing issues.

The deficiencies included:

◘ “Multiple load-bearing walls were observed without anchor bolts or other connecting means to show how the walls were connected to the footings.”

◘ “Recycled lumber was used on many headers, which need to be evaluated for structural soundness.”

◘ Cracks were found throughout the concrete slab flooring due likely to “improperly installed control joints.” And the company that poured the concrete slab “stated that no mesh reinforcement was installed.”

◘ The building lacked proper ductwork insulation, and though plans called for four holding cells, the consultants said, “the current construction appears to only have three holding cells, and the fourth was made much smaller and appears to be more of a closet.”

◘ Recently, workers ripped up the new sidewalk outside the building over concerns it didn’t comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

Last month, members of the council and the new police station building committee toured the project with their new general contractor, Scituate-based Sugrue and Associates. They discovered more problems, says longtime Town Council member David A. D’Agostino, who now heads the project’s building committee.

He says the windows will have to be replaced because they aren’t rated to hurricane-strength. The building’s vinyl siding will probably also have to be replaced because of an improper nail pattern used. And roof trusses need to be stronger.

“There were so many things wrong,” D’Agostino told The Journal. “Whoever was building it, built it as a ranch house, not a police station.”

D’Agostino said he “didn’t go for” Mahoney serving as the project’s general contractor. Neither did the council’s two other Republicans at the time, Charles A. Collins Jr. and Brenda L. Frederickson. “But he [Mahoney] had the votes and that was it.”

Mahoney says he poured his heart and soul into the project for the community. “I didn’t get paid one penny — nothing” and lost “thousands of dollars” of his own money in the time he devoted to the project.

“To his defense,” says D’Agostino, ”he was trying to save the town money. But he should have been building a station that would last a couple of decades and not a ranch house. He was just trying to keep a promise he made to the police officers. It has come back to bite us.”

Scituate voters approved spending $1.7 million for the project in January 2018. Mahoney and the rest of the Town Council’s Independent Men initially proposed a cost of about $1.4 million, an amount that David B. Campbell, chairman of the town Republican Party, labeled unrealistic and irresponsible.

In a letter to the editor that ran in The Valley Breeze newspaper in November 2017, Campbell said that underfunding the project “has the potential to burden Scituate taxpayers with significant cost overruns or potentially worse, deficient construction, which can lead to significant excess spending.”

The new Town Council president, James Brady Jr., says that with all the additional work needed, the station is expected to cost about $2.5 million.

Voters at an Oct. 15 Financial Town Meeting will be asked to approve the additional $800,000 needed to complete the job by the end of the year.

"If we had won the election," Mahoney says, "we would have finished the job. None of this would be going on.” He said the town’s police officers, now working out of trailers, “would be in the new police station by now.”

Many of the deficiencies cited, Mahoney says, were only because construction was still in progress.

For instance, some roof joists were purposely left out of the attic, he says, so that workers had the adequate crawl space to do the wiring work.

Plans for the windows included hurricane-rated steel shutters that could close in the event of bad storms.

And some supposed wiring problems in the attic have easy workarounds, he says, as a building committee member noted at last week’s Town Council meeting.

“I treated taxpayer money like it was my own,” says Mahoney. “I truly wanted to do the job. But this whole thing has opened my eyes to how nasty local politics can be.”

Meanwhile, supporters of the Independent Men and supporters of the Republican council continue using the police station project to lob political accusations at each other on social media, says Brady.

"It’s like trying to stop a ball rolling down a hill,” he says. “One side says something and then the other responds and they start banging away at each other.”

“It never used to be like this. It was a very calm community.”

Says D’Agostino: “The town managed to run very well before they came on,” referring to the Independent Men. “They’ve upset a few things.”

Well, says Mahoney, he’s running for Town Council again next year. So look out.

“2020 is going to be like fireworks,” he says. “You can bet your bottom dollar.”

With staff reports by Brian Amaral