Battle Creek's downtown fire station will stay open for the indefinite future as city officials go back to the drawing board to deal with cuts to the department.
By a margin of five to four, the City Commission on Tuesday night voted down a plan that would have added a bay to the 20th Street station to house the downtown station's ladder truck. Once the bay had been added, the downtown station would have closed.
The plan has been a source of much debate since it was proposed in early December. With it now apparently shelved, the obvious question is: What's next?
"At this point, I'm not going to spend any more time on it," said City Manager Wayne Wiley. "It's clear that whatever we bring forward, it meets with a lot of opposition."
City Commissioner Deborah Owens, who voted against the creation of the bay, took issue with that assessment. She said the past months' debate was an exercise in poor communication and called for a workshop in the near future to deal with the topic.
"In my opinion, this issue has totally spun out of control," she said. "We all want to see it behind us, but we also want to do the right thing."
She said she voted against the bay because the bigger picture
