The New Fire Station Tour

While I'll have several more posts to put up about the new Fire Station, I thought I'd go through what transpired verbally through my tour on Monday.

Originally when the meeting started there were 12 people there. As time went on it grew by a few more people but that was about it.

Chief See started off by telling everyone this was the second largest project the City of Salisbury has ever taken on, behind the new Waste Water Treatment Plant.

This building will replace the old Station 16. This station will house 8 bays for a working Fire Department. Special Ops will get 3 bays and the outdoor equipment will now be kept indoors. Gordy mentioned that piece by piece each piece of equipment will be replaced, new.

They mentioned the 53' tall Drill Tower but also mentioned that they will still go to Princess Anne to use their $2,000,000.00 burn facility for additional training. Makes me wonder why, since they have one of their own right up the street? Nevertheless, that will be up for surplus as well.

They stated that Gillis Gilkerson came in $53,000.00 below anyone else when bidding on the project. They are 30 days ahead of schedule. The building is 41,655 sq. ft and they even mentioned a typical Fire Station is 16,000 sq. ft. Depending on the numbers they threw out, which were divided and all over the place, they stated the building cost the Taxpayers $193.00 per square foot to build.

They mentioned it sits on 7.5 acres of land that they paid $311,350.00 for. I doubt they included this figure into the cost of the build out. As a matter of fact, I'm fairly confident they conveniently left that out. After all, it is a part of the overall cost.

At the end of the day the facility cost $9,553,927.00 so far. They went on to brag about how it's 3% below the budget for the project.

On April 1, 2008 the furniture and fixtures will be in and completed by the end of April. The video monitoring system throughout and around the building and audio and visual equipment will also be completed by the end of April. They also mentioned the old Station 16 will be available by July 1, 2008. You know, the $800,000.00 building they wanted to give away to Bill Ahtes. At this point I flat out asked See & Gordy, who owns the old Station 16? I heard it's owned by the Volunteers and their reply was, a simple title search will tell you that Joe. NO, that wasn't the answer to my question. Obviously they refused to answer it in front of everyone there.

A visitor asked if they'd be holding any banquets there and See replied, "Our Volunteers don't have time to do fundraisers." I want my guys doing training instead. He went on to say, Station II ran aprox. 800 calls last year. The Volunteers went on about 400 of those calls. (More of the same OC BS). The Volunteers don't go on ambulance calls Chief. Therefore, 1/2 of the time they could have been holding banquets. Besides, you could even afford to PAY a crew to cook and clean for these events, just use the facility. They did state that the Training room would be available to the Public for certain meetings.

You must be buzzed in when you walk into the facility. Gone are the days you can just walk into a Fire Station. I will have photos to follow this article.

The Turn Out Gear Room will house 110 racks for this equipment. Each set will cost the Taxpayers $1,800.00 each.

The Dormitory will sleep 8 people. There are no doors to close off each room. God forbid someone wake up at 3:00 AM after a night out and run face first into a door, right? Somehow they stated they could sleep 20 to 22 people there? There was another small area they figured they could put bunk beds in. See stated when he first started, they slept in the front seat of the Fire Trucks, so this is quite the luxury facility.

There is a Locker Room that houses 96 lockers. As mentioned earlier, there are 6 Unisex Bathrooms.


There is also what they call a "Safe Room." This is the area off to the side of the Fire Station in which I honestly feel is VERY misleading! The reason I say that is, if I were to hear this and raced to the Fire Station for safety, I would head to the main entrance of the building, wouldn't you? That's NOT the case here. The Safe Room is actually an entrance off to one side of the building, SO WHAT'S THE POINT?

The Paid and Volunteer Firefighters have their own Offices throughout the building. Of course, the Paid are in one wing and the Volunteers are in another, on opposite ends of the building.

At the end of my tour I turned to a friend of mine there and I said, Did that feel like a $10,000,000.00 Tour to you? He replied, F%$k No! Me either! The only thing that actually impressed me about the place was actually the kitchen. The way they boasted about all the plasma tv's going in everywhere kind of ticked me off. You'll be waiting in the front entrance and while doing so you'll be turned on to 24/7 videos of fires the Salisbury Fire Department have been to. The big $25,000.00 doors will be blocked by a museum, so what the heck did they buy them for? The Volunteers offered to pay CASH for all the new furnishings and guess what, Chief See & Deputy Chief Gordy said NO! They put it on the Taxpayers instead! Pieces of sh!t!

Like I said, whenever these guys want some money, I'd hang up the phone but not before I'd tell those SOB's to LET IT BURN, I don't give a sh!t!