New Jacksonville Fire Stations Will Have to Wait

For the past several years, Jacksonville's five-year plan for capital improvement projects included about $18 million to build new fire stations.

The same six projects were included in Mayor John Peyton's final capital improvement plan and then -- with each pushed back a year -- in Mayor Alvin Brown's first one.

This year, all but one of the projects have been shifted into the hazy planning period beyond fiscal year 2017, an admission that it's unknown when money for the work might be available.

The one project that will be done this year -- a $2.7 million station near Bartram Springs -- was kept on the list because it was something "we couldn't not do," said Chief Financial Officer Ronnie Belton.

"Building that station made absolute sense whether we had a bunch of money or no money," he explained.

Response times in the area are "well over 10 minutes," said Fire Chief Marty Senterfitt. Long response times present not just a public safety issue but a financial one for homeowners: Houses that are more than five miles away from a fire station face higher property insurance costs and buyers may face difficulties getting mortgages.

Of course, building the fire station is just part of the cost. Operating it is another matter.

"The fire station is just that -- it's bricks and mortar until you put firefighters in there," said Jacksonville Association of Firefighters Local 122 President Randy Wyse. "It makes no sense to build a fire station without staffing it properly."

For Wyse, the steadily dropping number of personnel as workers retire and are not replaced is an issue growing in import, with pinches likely to be felt this year, before the new station even opens. "There will be service reductions in this budget," he said. "There are going to be neighborhoods without firefighters."

The firefighters and emergency medical personnel who will staff the station once it's finished will come from some of the county's 53 other stations, Senterfitt said. The typical fire station has a minimum of four people on a shift.

The department is in the process of analyzing where stations overlap, pointing to spots from which people can be moved.

"We're doing a study of where fire resources are," the chief said. "In some areas they're quite dense. I have to redistribute the wealth."

All of the stations that had been in the five-year plans were originally put there on the advice of a 2006 study that suggested doing so in order to "bring response times closer to the accepted national standards and to meet the growing demand for emergency services in our community."

But growth has slowed in some of the areas for which stations were proposed and in others response times haven't yet reached a critical point, Senterfitt said.

The city is also trying to work more with other counties in neighborhoods that overlap borders: The St. Johns County fire department, for example, has a station being built near Nocatee, where Jacksonville doesn't have sufficient coverage, and Clay County has a station near Argyle Forest, another gap for Jacksonville.

At the same time, the new station near Bartram Springs will plug a hole in St. Johns' coverage.

Still, the other stations should be built at some point in the future, Senterfitt said, although they are not needed as urgently as the Bartram Springs location.

"Right now, we're doing everything we can to hang on," he said. "Now is not the time to be building for growth."

Removing the other projects entirely from the proposed project list reflects the uncertainty of when city revenues will rebound, Belton said.

"We're taking it a year at a time," he said. "Year by year we'll know what we're dealing with."

Since they were just looking at available funding, it made no sense to notionally plan for future construction. "We're not trying to be cute with it," Belton said. "We're not trying to promise something we can't do."

Copyright 2012 - The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville

McClatchy-Tribune News Service