Sean C. Morgan
The Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District is scheduled to wrap up its bond projects this summer.
Sweet Home voters approved a six-year $1.575 million bond levy in 2016. The bond initially had a rate of about 31 cents per $1,000 of assessed value. The rate declines as property values increase.
The bond paid for two new ambulances, a new rescue unit, a new battalion chief’s unit, new extrication equipment and other equipment replacements.
Last week, the district wrapped up a $93,000 remodel of the living quarters at the Fire Hall, 1099 Long St., and Fire Chief Dave Barringer said the job was completed on budget. He is now planning to move forward with a new shop building in July.
The living quarters provide more privacy for the firefighters who sleep overnight at the Fire Hall. They include new flooring, a new locker room, new cabinets, new sinks and private quarters.
“It was all kind of one big open space,” Barringer said, leaving individual firefighters with little or no privacy.
The battalion chiefs had a separate area, said Tanner Funk, a firefighter-paramedic, and the firefighters entered the quarters from the back. The project included a new hallway, allowing them access from the front of the Fire Hall, past the battalion chiefs’ room, to the crew’s living quarters.
Prior to the remodel, firefighter-medics slept in in a single large room with beds separated by 5-foot dividers. The quarters are divided by partial walls that grant privacy, with access through a dimly lit hallway.
The project created a total of five rooms, two with a single bed and three with two beds.
At this point, each room is inhabited by a single individual, a total of five sleeping overnight, Funk said. Each can sleep without interruptions other than calls.
“You’re not waking up the person next to you,” Funk said, when those calls come in. Each room is independently lighted. “You don’t have to worry about waking people up if they were up all night. Definitely, I think it’s a change for the better. Before, in the big common area, you had to be super quiet; you had to worry about turning the lights on to not wake anybody else up.”
Based on medical and fire calls, different firefighters and medics may be sleeping at different times throughout the day.
Firefighters began using the new quarters Tuesday night, he said. “Last night (Thursday) was my first time using it.”
Barringer said the district is planning to begin working on July 1 on a new $97,000 shop building, the final of planned bond projects.
The district will construct the new shop to the west of the Fire Hall.
The non-insulated building will have four bays, Barringer said. It will have electricity, but it will not have plumbing.
“It’s a shop,” he said. It will provide space to work on vehicles and bays available to store the district’s rescue boat, a rescue squad unit and a brush rig.
Volunteers will have use of one bay for their two trailers, including a food cart, Barringer said. The Volunteer Association raised $9,000 toward the construction of the building.
Following the shop project, Barringer said, he anticipates the district will have $35,000 remaining in bond funds. District officials have been talking about needed paving and fencing at Station 22, Foster, and Station 23, Crawfordsville.
They are looking at the costs, Barringer said, but the district will likely use the remaining funds at the two substations.
The Fire and Ambulance District also received notification last week that it had won a grant for nearly $1.48 million from the state to pay for seismic upgrades to the Fire Hall.
The majority of the work will be in the bays, Barringer said. The project will reinforce the roof, the bay doors and the bay’s two shear walls.
“We knew these doors were underbuilt,” Barringer said, and over the years, the district has added heavier-duty springs to the four bay doors used most often as the smaller springs have broken through use. The district has had to do a lot of maintenance on the bay doors since the building was constructed about 26 years ago.
“If you can’t get out with an emergency, it sucks,” he said.
The district will need to seek bids for engineering and designs and then for construction, Barringer said. He is hoping to begin construction by spring 2021.
In recent years, the same grant program has funded seismic upgrades at a similar cost at Holley Elementary, Foster Elementary, Hawthorne Elementary and the Sweet Home High School auditorium.