The Little Rock Fire Department is one approval away from finding a location for its planned southwest fire station.
The Little Rock Board of Directors will vote Tuesday on whether to allocate$500,000 to buy 1.46 acres near Base Line and Stagecoach roads.
For more than a year, the city has been hunting for a piece of property that it could afford and that would provide access to major roadways, which would cut firefighters’ emergency response times in southwest Little Rock.
Board approval on buying the property owned by STAMJA-DT AR Properties LLC would be a big step in building the station, but it wouldn’t mean that construction would start immediately.
“It’s a project that was included in the sales tax, which is a 10-year plan,” said Bryan Day, assistant city manager. “It’s definitely a priority for this board, a public-safety priority. But it’s going to be up to the city manager to decide when that project is ready for construction.”
Part of the decision on when to build will depend on the revenue coming in from the 1 percent sales-tax increase that city voters passed in 2011.
Three-eighths percent of the sales-tax increase is dedicated to capital-improvement projects. Five-eighths percent is dedicated to operations.
The tax revenue has not grown at the rate the city projected when it asked voters to approve the measure. As a result, the city has had to adjust its expectations for its 2013 revenue and for the projected 2014 budget.
Still, staff members - including City Manager Bruce Moore - have said their hopes are high that new businesses will help the tax revenue to grow.
The capital-improvements portion of the tax will end in 2021. The five-eighths percent portion will continue to be collected for operations of new buildings and renovated facilities.
“That’s something we have to be mindful of,” Little Rock Fire Chief Greg Summers said. “I would hate to venture off into the project, and we can build it but then not staff it because of sales-tax revenue. We need to make those prudent and mindful decisions.”
Summers said once the money is in place and the decision is made to move forward, the city will release a request for proposals on design of the fire station. The new station will look much like Station 23, which was finished earlier this year on Rahling Road.
But Summers said there will likely be some differences. Among them, 24 firefighters instead of 12 staffing the station and an additional rescue truck that’s capable of helping in all kinds of situations, including in water and trench-collapse rescues.
“We’re happy with the location, including the access to Interstate 30 that will improve our response time to several neighborhoods,” he said of the proposed site.
Summers and Day said estimating the cost to build the station will be hard until the architectural drawings are complete.
The city’s sales-tax plan set aside about $4 million for the project, Day said.
The Rahling Road station cost about $2.6 million to build and $500,000 more to stock with equipment, Summers said.
Even after the southwest station is complete, the Fire Department has other areas where it would like to place fire stations for better emergency-response times. Summers said specific neighborhoods have not been identified, but the Arkansas 10 area toward Pinnacle Mountain is high on his list for the department’s next capital expenditure request.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 12/01/2013