Grant for Training Tower Sought by NY Firefighters

Plans for a 40-foot fire training tower on 31st Street have nearby residents and at least one city councilman questioning how the site was chosen.

The Niagara Falls City Council unanimously approved a measure Tuesday to apply for a $500,000 state Dormitory Authority grant to erect the training facility, which is being considered for a city-owned parcel on 31st Street that is currently a parking lot.

Multiple council members, including Councilman Ken Tompkins and City Council Chairman Andrew Touma, said the measure was approved only to solidify the city’s interest in obtaining the money and that officials are not tied to the proposed parcel in the 500 block of 31st Street.

If erected at the site the tower – which Tompkins said would not be used for actual fires, but for experience operating in simulated smoke – would be a short walk from an existing Niagara Falls Fire Department station at 3115 Walnut Ave.

Gary Baillie lives across the street from the lot on 31st Street. He voiced his opposition to the measure Tuesday.

“We’re talking about building a smoke house right across the street from me in a residential neighborhood,” he said. “I don’t think that’s right. ... I think there’s other properties owned by the city where you could build that smoke tower and it would not affect neighborhoods.”

Baillie said the facility would immediately, negatively impact his and his neighbors’ property values as well as their daily quality of life. He also took issue with the scope of the facility, which does not include training structures for simulated fires, but only the “smoke house.”

“Why are we only looking to do only half a job with the smoke house?” he asked. “Why not a full-fledged fire training tower, not just smoke house?”

Tompkins said he wants “the best of the best training for our firefighters,” but that the proposed location and lack of community input to this point is a “problem.”

“We’d like to get as much grant money as humanly possible, who would not?” he said. “But nobody thought to look at the neighborhood.”

The state grant is in fact a legislative item requested in 2015 by Assemblyman John Ceretto, D-Lewiston. Ceretto said that while the project is a “good one,” he is not lobbying for the 31st Street location. The site, he said, is the city’s responsibility to choose.

“It should have the minimum impact to anywhere you put it,” Ceretto said. “The city needs to look at those concerns.”

Ceretto provided a series of application documents from the 2015 state legislative session, which detail the project, but appear to make no specific reference to a location outside of the “Hyde Park Boulevard area.”

In an undated letter to Ceretto, Niagara Falls Fire Chief Thomas Colangelo wrote that the city has been without a training site for 15 years since a facility on Hyde Park Boulevard and James Avenue was “condemned due to structural problems.”

Until then, the tower existed on the Niagara County-owned parcel. For now, Falls’ firefighters travel to River Road in Wheatfield to use a county-operated training facility, but the first responders and fire truck remain “in service for emergency calls,” Colangelo wrote in the letter.

On Wednesday, Colangelo said he is reevaluating the plan.

“Due to the concerns of some of citizens, we are looking at possible alternative locations,” he said. “The old training tower option is being explored also.”

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