LITTLE ROCK — It has been 20 years since Little Rock last opened a new fire station.
After the opening of the city’s 21st firehouse on Rahling Road in west Little Rock on Monday morning, Little Rock Fire Department Chief Greg Summers said it wouldn’t take another 20 years for the next.
Summers said the city is looking at land on Stagecoach Road in southwest Little Rock for a new station funded by city sales-tax revenue.
That station would shorten response times and move Little Rock toward an Insurance Service Organization Level 1 rating, the best possible, from a Level 2. That would ease residential insurance rates paid by citizens, Summers said.
The southwest station - which Summers said would be bigger than the $2.6 million, 8,000-square-foot facility opened Monday - will cost anywhere from $3 million to $5 million.
The city is in the midst of land purchase negotiations, and Summers said it would likely take 15 months to complete the southwest station once negotiations were settled.
The department will use operation funds from the sales tax to pay for 24 firefighters to staff the larger southwest station.
Able to reach the western ends of the city more quickly, as well as provide aid to other neighborhoods in west Little Rock, the crews working out of the recently opened station No. 23 will help cut fire-response times - which measure how long it takes 15 firefighters to reach a scene - by a third, from about 12 minutes to eight minutes, Summers said.
The city had owned the land station No. 23 sits on since 1998, but it needed the help of a $2 million grant from the federal government to complete what Summers called a “state-of-the-art facility.”
Equipped with individual bedrooms and a weight room, as well as a spacious kitchen and living quarters filled with lounge chairs and a big-screen TV, station No. 23 will provide service to the western edge of the city limits.
The station’s new $450,000 engine and brush-truck, a smaller vehicle meant to handle brush fires and the only of its kind in the Little Rock department, will be run by three four-man shifts, all of which were paid for by new sales-tax revenue.
Assistant Chief Doug Coney said the new captains were selected after an internal application process and that each captain got to pick his own crew, as well as one of the “rookie” firefighters who recently joined the department.
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 12/11/2012