City Council Meeting

Jim FeatherSecond project we commend to your consideration as a priority is the Fire Station 3 project. We have this relatively dated facility and sufficient. I know some of you had the opportunity to tour it. I did not have the opportunity to join you. I wish I had been able to do that. It was some of the concerns that we'd heard on both sides of the equation for this project that we invited a representative from the fire department to speak with us as we consider what our priorities would be for this. There are a number of matters related to the kinds of facilities that are available to the firefighters themselves. as they relate to their comfort, their preparedness, and... Sorry?

Dr. Matt RiceYeah, just very quickly, just with the schools, We have to be very careful about the planning and logistics of doing or educating in a facility that's being rebuilt. The fire station is very, very much the same. The cost of relocating the department temporarily is several million dollars just for the relocation. So the strategic acquisition of property next to Fire Station 3 will facilitate this project in a way that has to be very specifically handled in terms of the sequence and the events. I'll also note that the cost of us running police department, fire department includes insurance and accreditation exercises. The fire department is highly esteemed and the rates that we pay to keep our businesses

Stacy HallThank you. I've long thought about this cross-functional interdepartmental planning, and I think it's probably unfortunate that we weren't having these same thoughts a few years ago because I do think there have been some potential opportunities for these programs, these plans, as we're now discussing the Willard Sherwood facility and we're discussing the fire station and we're discussing the property yard. only continuing to grow. And in conjunction with the school bond, I mean, I was just, you know, rattling off numbers here as everything was going. And I know I'm a numbers person, and that's, you know, first and foremost where I go with it. But it's crazy. I mean, the property yard initially, I think, was $58 million, $63 million, and now we're at $155

million. So those are honestly the things that keep me up at night. I think that the West Drive property yard is a great investment for our city. What we're going to do with it, I don't know. But I do agree that that's something that we should purchase and we should hang on to. But it does make me think about these other conversations that we're having and what we can do with them. And I understand that we want a fire station and that we may need a fire station, but I also understand that we need a place to store vehicles. We need a property yard. You know, we've already lost the opportunity potentially to combine Willard-Sherwood or Sherwood with, or whatever it would have been called, with a fire station. You know, there's a