Annexation and growth brings growing pains to department
CHENEY/MEDICAL LAKE — Spokane County Fire District 3 and the community it serves is growing, and the department is busy making room for its expanding staff in Medical Lake and at its headquarters at Station 31 in Cheney.
Construction plans are ready to go to bid “in a couple of weeks,” for the approximately $200,000 project to renovate Station 311, formerly known as the Medical Lake Fire Station, according to Don Crawford, District 3 assistant fire chief.
Scheduled to start in February, once completed sometime in July Station 311 will become the district’s second station to house full-time firefighters around the clock, similar to Station 33 in Four Lakes.
Located in the Medical Lake City Hall building and wedged between city offices and the Spokane County Sheriff’s SCOPE office, renovations at Station 311 will add sleeping quarters for four firefighters, a laundry room, restrooms with showers, utility and storage spaces, and a kitchenette and common area, all in the rear portion of the station’s now-open parking bay.
A ladder truck, called a “Quint,” a medical response unit and a fire engine will be permanently housed at the station, Crawford said.
The district is leasing the space from the city of Medical Lake for a $1 per year for 50 years.
Meanwhile, renovations are underway at Station 31 in Cheney using staff and part-paid on-call volunteer firefighters to do much of the work, Crawford said.
District 3 prides itself on doing much of its own work in-house, fabricating most of its own fire apparatus, and will likewise be using staff to complete the updates to the headquarters building.
Not so with the Medical Lake renovations which, because the building doesn’t belong to the district, must be put out for bid by general contactors with worker pay at prevailing wages.
“Which is atypical for us,” Crawford said. “We typically … do all of the work with our on-call paid (volunteers) that we can.”
The approximately $75,000 Station 31 project is the first of a two phases intended to make room for the departments growing staff.
“We do as much as we can,” he said. “It saves the taxpayers a lot of money.”
Phase two is budgeted for next year and will renovate administrative offices that house fire chiefs, division commanders and administrative personnel. It will also move the facility’s current entryway from the east to the north, adjacent to the parking lot.
New magnetic security doors will be installed in the foyer.
“After 35 years we just need a lot more offices,” Crawford said, adding that command personnel are currently sharing space.
“The goal of this is to maintain a team environment,” Crawford, who spent 30 years as a contractor himself, said of the new floor plan.
While there is no timeline for completion of the Station 31 work due to the necessity of responding to emergency calls, he estimated it would be finished in around 60 days.
Crawford added the district does everything on a pre-paid basis, including the Medical Lake work.
“The money’s in the bank for all of this,” he said.
The district has grown from a single chief and four division deputy chiefs to the chief, two deputy chiefs, four division chiefs and two career battalion chiefs, according to Crawford, with call volumes driving that growth.
In the early 2000s, the district responded to between 800-900 calls, he said. That volume has since grown to around 2,400.
“Until the increases in staff, all those calls were handled by the same four guys,” Crawford said.
The emergence of the likes of Amazon, and taking on Medical Lake and similar issues have fueled part of the growth as well.
Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].
Reader Comments(0)