City Council Work Session and Regular Meeting

Clarkclerkour next item is a discussion and update on the fire station number three feasibility study I will recognize John O'Neill fire chief for the staff presentation

John O'NeillstaffGood evening, Mayor and Council. A little tech support. Thanks. We wanted to provide you with an update on the Station 3 project and provide you with some background on how we got to where we are today. And after the presentation, solicit feedback from you. Before I turn the floor over to Mr. Mark Minetti to discuss the feasibility study, space needs analysis, and initial concept designs, I wanted to give a little background. In the fall of 2021, we opened the new fire station 33. At that time, there were a lot of discussions with the council and city manager on their desire to improve the quality of life and address health and safety concerns at station three, thus providing the same quality work environment for both work groups.

Mark MinettiFamiliar faces and I see some new faces so some of this may be recap and then first time you're hearing this. So the purpose of meeting with you today is to review the process to date with City Council and to review the project, give you a project progress update to the due diligence process that culminated in the acquisition of the adjacent parcel for the purpose of delivering the Fairfax City Fire Station number three facility, to talk about next steps with respect to the program validation and concept design, and to gather further feedback from the City Council. So just in recap, we divided the process up into several different scopes. Okay, so scope A was the functional assessment of the existing

facility. So we looked at your existing fire station number three from many different perspectives. We looked at it from just a systemic perspective to see what the available life cycle is for the building, how the building programmatically operates, how it supports the mission of fire and rescue. We looked at the site and utility assessment to determine whether or not the existing site would support a redevelopment. And as I mentioned, a full systematic assessment determined which systems could facilitate a renewal, a renovation, or expansion of the existing building. The outcomes of that were very definitive. The existing building fabric. Actually, you can go to the next slide. I think I have.

okay so well we'll get to that but scope b while we were assessing the existing facility we were also validating the program for the new facility so we went through and developed room criteria sheets for each space that would occur within the fire station facility and looking at best practices as fire chief mentioned that was really important to the city to make sure that the the new fire station had the latest and greatest in terms of best practices and so we developed the the needs assessment and then the next step of the process included. We then took that program and we did some test fits of the existing site. So here we're looking at the existing fire station facility. We're looking at what can we preserve of the existing fabric of the building, what made sense,

again from an operational perspective, from a best practices perspective, from the current program as we developed it, as the needs have increased and the staffing has increased and the vehicle, the needs for the different crews have increased, that all needed to be considered. So the first part of that was to look at the existing building to see if there was potential to expand, replace, to expand the building first and renovate it, but also potentially site and as I was getting ready to say related to the existing building there really wasn't potential to salvage any portion of that building to support the development of a new state-of-the-art fire station the existing building occurred on four stories it was built in additions different types of

construction the fabric of the structural fabric of the building was not was not conducive to expanding or renovating in place so the option of reusing the existing facility and expanding and replacing was determined to not be in the city's interest. So then we were looking at test fitting a replacement facility, but on the current site. So the current site, as you know, is a very narrow parcel. Typical state-of-the-art fire stations, we like to have drive-through bays. In this case, the program was set for five drive-through different out-of-the-box options for how we might be able to facilitate the delivery of a new fire station on the existing site. One of the things that needs to be understood is if we are building on the existing site that

necessitates a temporary site or relocation of facilities to portions of the facilities to the existing fire station 3. So there's added cost when you do that. so we did do our due diligence to figure out if there was viable ways that we could replace the building on the current site and while there were options they weren't great and that led us to come back to the City Council and seek seek kind of a thumbs up to begin to look for new site candidates for for relocating the facility. And so that takes us to the next scope. So scope D, finding the new site. We looked at different characteristics, GIS data, call data from the fire department, and we developed a criteria for selecting the sites

and scoring the sites. And we looked at, I can't remember how many candidates we looked at here, it looks like there's nine of them. We may have looked at more, but they didn't fall, they fell out of the survey. MAP THEM AND WE SCORED EACH ONE OF THE CANDIDATES RELATED TO THE CRITERIA AND THE LOCATIONS THAT WERE HIGHEST WE EVALUATED AND DID TEST FITS ON THOSE SITES. THAT INCLUDED ULTIMATELY THE SITE THAT WAS OCCUPIED BY THE GEORGE MASON FOUNDATION. SO THE NEXT STEP, AGAIN THIS GOES A LITTLE BIT DEEPER INTO THE LOCATION AND RESPONSE So obviously your existing fire station 3 is where it is your existing fire station 33 is where it is Your response times are predicated by that So any movement is going to change the dynamic for response right and your city has kind of a I guess really an east-west and north-south

Access in terms of the way the traffic patterns work And so ultimately what we were finding was it was it was favored to be closer to fire station 3 in order to respond to the city ultimately what that was leading us to was either the parcel to the right or to the left of the existing fire station okay and as part of that due diligence process we did as I mentioned test fits on every one of the site candidates that we felt were were were substantial and valid to go through that process this is the the one that we did for the George Mason property to validate that that site would actually function and support the delivery of a new fire station. So the next step of that process was then to acquire the site which the city I

Speaker 50As Chief mentioned, that cost estimate is a rough order of magnitude cost estimate. We gathered data from similar fire stations around Loudon County the Fairfax and develop that estimate based on the space program that we had at that time. So as we move forward during the design we will further refine that cost estimate and whether it was up or down based on the space program and other factors. And one factor right now that I see the tariffs are like kind of impacting future construction and some contractors are like looking at that as a potential to increase the cost for future projects. We have not considered that yet, but we will see.

Brian Fosterstaffdebt and and because it because of the multi-year nature we may issue some of you know we may issue part of the debt to get started and pay for construction and then you know two year a year or two years later we may issue the remainder of the debt because this is will be a multi-year process so the fire the fire station construction is probably 18 months or longer would be my guess so So you're potentially spanning three fiscal years, depending on when you start. And so that's why we will finance it in such a way. But to your point, yes, the payments will be level once we start paying the debt service. So we will know what those payments are. But until we know the cost, I can't answer your question specifically about what the debt service payment will be specifically on this project.

Wendy SanfordstaffSo what you see is all of the streets in this area around Blenheim in this area do not connect out to Fairfax Boulevard. In order for residents to get out of this neighborhood by vehicle, the access is on Blenheim Boulevard. And so what this connection does is provide a non-vehicular connection across Fairfax Boulevard. Otherwise, it's about almost a mile and a half to get from the same point sort of in Country Club Hills out to Fairfax Boulevard using Lion Run or going around closer to Old Town. So what this does is it provides access to bicycle facilities on Fairwoods Parkway to the George Snyder Trail and it was and it's located right behind the fire station giving it sort of eyes on the trail which provides a level of security and safety. This shows the the concept planning

AnnastaffThe terrain is variable. It's flat towards the country club's neighborhood, and then as you approach the fire station, it has a significant grade to it, And so grading and the impact of trees would be a concern in that area. And like most projects, planting and invasive management, and I would think overall impact would probably lean towards more of the moderate end because of that grade as well as the invasive concern. Thank you.

Stacy HallThank you. So when it comes to the Country Club Hills Connector, the slide, I think it's nine, the functional street grid, just to point out there that that doesn't include the footpaths that currently exist my husband and our dog and I went out and walked those over the weekend we did the entire George Snyder's Trail we did the footpath that goes from Pinehurst to the high school and we did the footpath that goes from the Commons down and I don't know if we took a wrong turn or but we dumped out on the not police or fire station side of the M&T Bank the Main Street Bank there the

Doug Coxpublic commentGot along fine without it. We have so much debt already, we don't need to keep adding to it. Now I hear 27 years after we refurbished fire station 3, are we really going to get rid of that one and decide, I think I see in the capital budget, $40 million for a fire station? We're not Fairfax County, and yet Fairfax County can still build one, a fire station out of Tyson's, with a transit facility for $20 million. as 40 million dollars five million for land the rest i don't know i don't know where these numbers come from can't keep paying it what these other folks are saying i feel like i got a deal mine only went 14 folks yay me but i got divorced this past year so i had to go through all this stuff