Almost two years after central peninsula voters backed the construction of a new fire station for Soldotna, the building is starting to take shape.
Right now, the new fire station doesn’t really look like a fire station. It’s mostly cement and wood frames. Pipes stick out of the ground, and white hard hats are mandatory attire for anyone taking a look around.
With the smell of lumber in the air, Fire Marshal Chuck Roney gestures while explaining what the different spaces will be.
“This is going to be the main entrance through this covered area, and this will kind of be (the) initial, kind of lobby-esque space,” he said while walking through the site. “And then over there, where those gentlemen area, that’ll be the beginnings of the – kind of the admin wing.”
When it opens, the building will be a new home base for the emergency service area’s busiest station. It’ll replace the agency’s existing station, which was built in the 1950s as a community hall. In the subsequent decades, it was appended with add-ons still used by the agency.
But a few years ago, two-thirds of service area voters backed the agency’s ask for a new station. The vote gave the borough permission to incur up to $16.5 million worth of debt for the project. Crews broke ground last summer and Roney says they're hoping to have the station done by next January.
He says he’s most excited to have all the public safety employees in one place.
“There's just kind of been a separation between – we have our administration on this side of the street and everybody else on the other and so it's a lot of running back and forth, a lot of phone calls,” Roney said. “You know, having this here in one unified location will be great.”
A key constraint of the current station is a lack of space. Even with the station admin relegated to the borough’s 9-1-1 dispatch center across the street, many spaces serve multiple purposes. There’s fitness equipment in the vehicle bay, ambulance supplies sequestered at the top of a narrow staircase and dorms in a former reception office.
Just as the agency’s existing station has supported generations of emergency service, Roney envisions a lengthy future for the new space.
“You know, when you build a building like this, you're – you want to try to plan it for a 30-year-plus lifespan, right?” he said. “In 30 years time, we’ll likely have outgrown this one as, well. But it does give us some room to grow, just not quite as much as we dreamed of, right?”
The station still has a long way to go. As of Thursday, it was without walls, the second-floor dormitories and, of course, the fireman’s pole. Roney says sometimes it feels like nothing’s happening, but then a whole section will go up at once.
Walking into what’ll eventually become his office, Roney says it’s a little smaller than he’d like. But he also doesn’t need a lot of space, so he says it’ll work out. Down the street, the wail of sirens indicate some of his coworkers are already heading to their next emergency.
