Fairfield updates estimate of new fire station to $8.1 million

FAIRFIELD – The City of Fairfield has updated the projected cost of its new fire station from $6 million to $8.1 million, and will seek additional grant funding to complete the project.

The Fairfield Public Safety and Transportation Committee met with the architectural firm Klingner & Associates and city staff on Nov. 9, and decided to proceed with a modified floor plan for the fire station so that it had a smaller footprint but with more second-floor storage than the one initially proposed about two years ago. The new fire station will be 20,100 square feet, more than double the current station which is about 9,000 square feet.

In March 2022, Fairfield voters approved giving the city the authority to bond up to $5 million for the fire station, which at the time was expected to cost $6 million. Fairfield Public Works Director and City Engineer Melanie Carlson said that, after a few years of high inflation, it became apparent that the new fire station could not be built for $6 million without a major revision of its design. Rather than redesign the fire station, the city has opted to keep the design mostly the same, but to seek more funding.

The committee asked Klingner to investigate whether money could be saved with minor redesigns. The initial design called for a hose tower and separate training tower that could be used by multiple fire departments, but the committee wants to find out if those two things can be combined into a single tower.

The city had originally planned to begin building the new fire station this year so it could be ready for firefighters to move into by late 2024, but now the plan is for the bidding to occur in the summer of 2024, so the fire station won’t be ready to move into until 2025 at the earliest.

Carlson said the city will keep all the promises it made to residents leading up to the March 2022 referendum, where 75 percent of Fairfield voters cast a ballot to support the bond.

“Our goal is not to change anything from the referendum,” Carlson said. “We’re just going to do them a little differently than how we originally thought. For the referendum, we had only done 10 percent of the design process, and some things hadn’t been fleshed out. Now we’ve done 60 percent, which gives us a solid footprint. The remaining 40 percent will be getting plumbing from Point A to Point B, and getting the package ready to bid.”

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com

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