“Good things take time,” Trustee Tom Farrell said of the nearly two-year process to build new Station 112.
The more centrally located fire station on Princeton Road at Cincinnati Dayton Road is expected to improve response times and cut costs by as much as $4 million, Farrell said. The original long-range plan called for a fourth fire station, and the trustees bought a piece of land for $384,000 on Cincinnati Dayton Road north of Millikin Road for that purpose.
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Trustees have estimated they saved $2 million to $3 million in construction and operation costs by building a single replacement station. Farrell said personnel will likely be the largest savings because the township can staff one station more efficiently than two.
“We have options that wouldn’t be available with the two stations that we have with one,” Farrell said. “So we believe that we’ll see savings out of this above and beyond the construction for decades.”
Another estimated $1 million savings will be realized with the decision not to move headquarters to the new building. Trustee Board President Steve Schramm said the new building’s footprint would have needed to expand to accommodate headquarters, but space is available in existing facilities.
“It was literally just a matter of space,” Schramm said. “We were going to have to add 1,000 to 2,000 square feet to that facility to move all those people there and when we really got to looking at the square-footage available in those stations, I kind of said why don’t we stay.”
An early estimate for the construction cost for Station 112 was $6.6 million. The trustees balked at the price and began touring other facilities for ideas. A hybrid structure of metal and brick was considered but discarded, according to Farrell. Leakage with a hybrid building was a big factor.
The township will sell bonds to pay for the projects and those loans will be repaid with fire levy and general fund dollars. Trustee Christine Matacic said even with the bidding process — they split the new construction from the renovations — they have tried to maximize their resources.
“It’s like anything else, we want to take our time, we want to make sure we’re doing it right and we want to make sure that funding is available at the appropriate time and we have the resources to pay those loans back,” she said. “I think that’s all a part of how we have managed the taxpayers dollars.”
He said they haven’t heard a peep form neighbors since. It will take about a year to build the station.
“It’s kind of a good time, there’s been a lull over the last three or four months in the construction arena,” Schramm said. “A lot of people are slowing down so I think we might have hit a sweet spot here for some aggressive folks on the bid calendar.”
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