[This transcript was generated automatically from audio using AI and hasn't been reviewed by a person -- it can contain mistakes, including plausible-sounding sentences that were never actually said. Treat it as a starting point, not a verbatim record.]

[0:52] Just before we get started, we have a new recording secretary who will be participating. Holly will be helping us out tonight. So she does not recognize your voices. And the camera is not going to be on you. It's going to be on. That's what the shiny heads here. Three of us. So.
[1:12] So anyway, if you ask a question, if you would just state who you are, because again, she will not be able to
[1:19] understand who you are so that would be helpful to us if you could do that as counselors and I know it'll be difficult to remember and also please make sure you have your mic on and then close to your mouth so that they can be heard by folks who are that would be helpful to us if you could do that.
[1:36] Okay. Good evening and welcome to the September 27th special meeting with other city council. Our topic, topic this evening is to discuss the status of plans for a place for the station one, including a financial analysis, and this is for information only so no public hearings tonight.
[1:54] They manage them all home, it's like to give you your spill because we have an online
[1:57] audience as well.
[1:58] Yeah, that's me and it's being connected to the Coins of the Regions of RSA and Adding
[2:01] One A and it's being conducted here in the City Council Chambers.
[2:04] It's also being live streamed to the City's website.
[2:07] There's a virtual component through Microsoft Teams on the City's website and there's a phone
[2:11] component you can participate in one of those three means if you wish to do so.
[2:15] That information is located on the live meetings page for our website.
[2:18] You're having difficulty accessing me.
[2:20] You can email me and I'll try to assist you as best I can to get in.
[2:23] to the meeting. If there is a problem in the virtual component of the meeting, the meeting
[2:27] will still continue if the owner acquired by state statute is to have an in-person here.
[2:33] If I don't know if you're going to take public comments, you're choosing to do that. But
[2:36] if there is a point when the mayor allows for public comment, if you're in the council chambers,
[2:40] you'll need to go to this microphone over here to be able to do that. If you are remote,
[2:45] you don't have to worry about trying to find the raised hand function. All you need to do
[2:48] is unmute yourself, state your name, the jurisdiction in which you live. If you live in the city,
[2:52] the warden which you with within our city. And then the mayor will recognize you with that time and allow you to speak.
[2:59] And then if you all set, sir.
[3:00] Thanks for for our new recording secretary. We have one, two, three, four, five, six of our nine counselors.
[3:07] With us this evening, Councillor Woodlesy, Councillor Simon, system Mayor Below, Councillor Heisted and Councillor Wilkie.
[3:15] We do anticipate Councillor Hill arriving in about half an hour.
[3:18] So, we will probably end up with seven, perhaps eight of our nine members.
[3:23] Take it away.
[3:25] All right, so as you know, this is what we've decided to do since the last two years now,
[3:30] is the bigger projects and sort of squeeze all those in and one night.
[3:34] We would spread that out a little bit because the council is more time.
[3:39] And there's also in terms of space and time, as you know, normally we have this discussion
[3:43] on October 18th and starts to limit the time for which you can ask questions and we can
[3:46] it back to you with information that you may need to help you make a decision on December
[3:52] 13th.
[3:52] December 13th is the public carrying the budget and we take public comment on not just
[3:58] the capital improvement items but the entire budget and then hopefully the council make
[4:03] a decision on the budget which takes effect on January 1st of 2024.
[4:08] This project we're talking about tonight of course is the Central Fire Station project.
[4:12] but October 4th is a regular council meeting,
[4:15] but we're gonna be talking about the childcare center,
[4:18] we're looking to construct up in the western part of the city.
[4:22] That's another very large project.
[4:24] So we're taking that out of the normal flow of CIP projects.
[4:28] So that way it's more manageable on the 18th
[4:30] when we talk about the remaining cap on improvement items.
[4:33] So obviously I'm not gonna do an overview in each charts
[4:36] that you have that talks about the CIP.
[4:38] You'll get that on the 18th.
[4:39] Tonight is to allow you to learn what's being proposed for the fire station project and be able to ask some questions that might be helpful to you to help you make your decision.
[4:49] Obviously a very big decision in the city and a very costly decision that would need to be made to address the various problems that we have.
[4:56] So let me further ado, I've got the chief and the assistant chief here will help and we also have remote.
[5:03] We have our architectural firm from Ovali-Brensinger
[5:05] with any questions and regards to the conceptual design.
[5:09] Remember, we don't have a final design.
[5:11] We won't have that until a project gets approved on the 13th.
[5:15] I should say when the project gets approved on the 13th.
[5:18] And then we have a construction management firm,
[5:20] Ryakko Yufame with at the very room that you're in.
[5:22] They helped to reconstruct and did a rather fantastic job
[5:26] and he was to say.
[5:27] So I'll turn it over to Shifi as a PowerPoint.
[5:30] And I encourage you, anywhere along the lines,
[5:32] Just feel free to ask questions that the mayor of course would allow that to occur
[5:37] And now just to make sure you're you're following along with it because there's a lot to this
[5:42] You're all set sir. Oh, I don't do that. Please get started. You can absolutely can we get the
[5:49] On the plug and reflug
[6:20] Well,
[6:29] he's doing that Holly for the record councillors psychs has just arrived if you'd include him on the attendance roster
[6:35] Councillor Sykes, we're just doing some technical issues here.
[6:39] I announced that we have a new recording secretary, so she's not familiar with your voices.
[6:44] And the camera's going to be on the three of us.
[6:46] So when you're speaking, if you just state your name and you have time to ask a question
[6:49] or say that, that would help her be able to record it properly if you could help us out
[6:53] with that.
[7:33] That's just not the right thing.
[7:37] So head to that.
[7:39] Yeah,
[7:42] it's on teams showing on teams. It's just not the right one.
[7:47] We'll be able to see it on this screen as well. Yeah,
[8:04] you're going to hit, you've got to, you've got to get a little there.
[8:18] There we go. Okay, very good. Sorry about that.
[8:23] First of all, thank you all for being here tonight. I know that, especially this time here, you guys have got a lot going on.
[8:28] And this is just an extra meeting on an added on top of it. So we really appreciate it. We're excited to share the progress
[8:34] and where we're at tonight.
[8:36] So this is Chief Wheatley for Pauling.
[8:37] Sorry.
[8:38] I'm on the far chief, Jim Wheatley.
[8:41] I'm pretty impressed with the slide now.
[8:46] So really, this vision started, as you know,
[8:49] probably almost about five years ago now,
[8:51] when we did the Public Safety Study,
[8:52] which we'll talk about in the city,
[8:54] and really what we're trying to accomplish here
[8:56] is to design a new modern fire station
[8:58] that meets not only the needs of our community,
[9:00] but provides an occupationally safe working environment
[9:03] for our first responders.
[9:08] So the main project members so far have been myself,
[9:12] The fire chief, Robert Robasek, who we mentioned, who is the architect, who is online with us tonight.
[9:18] And Bert Delabru, which I completely slaughtered that pronunciation.
[9:22] I'm sorry, Bert, but he's online from React with us as well.
[9:28] So a little bit of history about the building for those of you who don't know, was constructed in 1954.
[9:34] And in that time, there was no female members of the organization.
[9:37] So it didn't have any multi-gender locker room facilities.
[9:40] these currently, we employ five female employees,
[9:43] two of them are in the firefighter EMT position,
[9:46] two of them are community nurses
[9:47] and one administrative assistant.
[9:49] It goes without saying that it's a very poor energy,
[9:53] efficient building, the energy efficiency is terrible.
[9:56] It's much smaller and less functional apparatus
[9:58] during this period.
[10:00] So one of the things that's made the apparatus much larger
[10:03] for our building or for our profession now is
[10:05] we aren't just a fire department anymore.
[10:08] We serve a lot of things in the community,
[10:09] we respond to all hazards and the emissions have required the cooling systems to be much larger
[10:15] in the trucks as well. So larger motors, larger cooling systems. So the trucks have just overall
[10:20] become bigger and the door size is becoming a significant issue for us and it does require us
[10:25] to order special apparatus that will fit into the base. When it was constructed it was constructed for
[10:32] a volunteer fire department that responded less than 100 calls annually and we still actually have
[10:36] the call log from the year the fire department was was formed or built I should say and it was
[10:43] constructed without all the knowledge we know now about occupational health and safety and a
[10:47] separation of working and living areas from the apparatus floor and separation of the contamination
[10:52] areas things that are very important but are causing significant health hazards to our responders today
[11:00] so right now that it's poor airflow and ventilation there's no HVAC system we rely on window air
[11:06] conditioning units. All of the individual spaces we fight over thermostats because the zones are
[11:12] only broke up a certain way. The assistant chief likes his office nice and warm. I like mine cool.
[11:17] We fight over the thermostat to heat the big room. All of the living areas are like that. The apparatus
[11:24] floor where all the employees spend a large portion of their time doing reports is not it's warmed by
[11:32] motine heaters that are hung in the ceiling and it's cooled by humid air in the summertime
[11:38] or a fan that we put out front. There's no air conditioning in there to keep the responders
[11:42] cool when they need to be. We've had the roof repaired many, many times over the years
[11:50] and you've seen and I'll show you again some pictures of the damage that we're starting
[11:53] to see not only in the ceiling tiles but in the structural members of the roof as well
[11:58] in the steel trusses are beginning to rust in the building because of all the water exposure
[12:02] that they've gotten over the years.
[12:04] We've asked a couple of roofing companies to come back
[12:06] and give us a quote in the last couple of weeks, actually,
[12:08] because of all the rain we got this summer on repairing it.
[12:12] And they told us it's no longer a repair option.
[12:14] The entire roof needs to be replaced.
[12:16] I'm waiting for a quote to come back on that
[12:18] to see what that would actually come in at.
[12:21] The Plime Events System, which is the exhaust system
[12:23] that we use to hook the trucks to exhaust the diesel fumes
[12:26] from the vehicles as much as we can,
[12:29] was installed somewhere in the mid-90s.
[12:31] We're going to say 1995, and again, it's reaching the end of its life in both stations,
[12:37] station two and station one.
[12:38] The one at station two right now, we're waiting on the ventilation motor for it,
[12:43] so that system is down right now, and the system at station one,
[12:47] we spend quite honestly between $4,000 and $5,000 a year just to maintain that with repairs.
[12:53] It's becoming very expensive, and it's a very critical component of our health and safety.
[13:00] We had a hazardous assessment done of the building.
[13:02] we know that there are asbestos tiles located in offices underneath carpets.
[13:06] They're in the main training room.
[13:08] They're underneath carpets and bunk rooms, asbestos pipe wraps in the attic space
[13:14] and lead paint detected in multiple locations throughout the station as well.
[13:22] So just as a recap, many of you were here, but some of you weren't on the council in 2019
[13:27] when the public safety facility was conducted. Our study was completed,
[13:31] which incorporated the police department and all three of our fire stations.
[13:35] station three is for those of you who are wondering is on Dartmouth College Highway right
[13:41] near the infield town line. We store some accessory equipment there. We don't have
[13:45] any staffing there. Phase one of the study was to kick off the study and develop a program,
[13:52] space program, projecting out as far as 2039. So to identify what our needs were in the police
[13:58] and fire departments up until 2039 and then taking an assessment of the existing conditions
[14:04] and operational assessment of the department and see how we need to fit that in and what
[14:09] we could do better or what we need to do if we need to do anything.
[14:14] So the operational assessment came back and said that the administrative offices are not
[14:19] readily accessible to the public.
[14:21] So right now all of our fire prevention officials and the administrative assistant who deal with
[14:24] the public day in and day out are located on the second floor, steep stairs, those of you
[14:29] have been in the fire station familiar with what I'm talking about. There is no elevator,
[14:33] so it's not ADA accessible. There's no working space for plans review or meetings with staff.
[14:40] We have three fire inspectors that are framed into one office. Some of you have worked in that
[14:45] office before and it's very, very tight in there with just two of you and now three people are in
[14:49] there. Plans review much of it is electronic now, but occasionally they need to spread out paper
[14:54] plans and look at those as well.
[14:57] They are very, very busy division of our department.
[15:00] Department, and it's becoming very crowded in there. We, we talked about the ADA compliance already, and we're just not, we're not welcoming to the community or anybody else, any of our employees that may need that. The fire stations are between station one and two, they're between 43 and 65 years old. That was then, they're actually 70, you know, 49 to 70 years old at this point. The apparatus base and living facilities and building systems don't meet ADA or life safety code requirements.
[15:29] And there's insufficient areas for EMS equipment, decontamination and storage, which I'll go more into depth further on in the presentation.
[15:41] There's no available space for maintenance and repair of apparatus equipment.
[15:45] The storage of our apparatus is is a big issue that we have.
[15:50] The maintenance is less of an issue than it was when this study's done because we partnered with public works who's doing a phenomenal job maintaining our vehicles.
[15:56] So our large apparatus goes down to the public works facility in their maintenance area and we take care of those needs down there.
[16:03] We do small minor repairs within the fire station now.
[16:07] There's no proper restroom or shower facilities. Again, I'll show you this in detail later.
[16:12] But the main shower facility in the building is serves as a female locker room in a multi-gender shower and bathroom.
[16:19] room.
[16:23] No space or proper area for physical fitness training. Obviously physical fitness
[16:27] mental wellness is very important to our profession. We've had to convert one of the
[16:32] old bunk rooms into a partial fitness room. And one of our smaller conference rooms has
[16:38] been converted into this was some time ago into a fitness room as well. They're poorly ventilated.
[16:44] We mop them and keep them clean, but I assure you with the sweat that takes place in those
[16:48] room that it's probably not the most sanitary area that we should be using for that purpose and it
[16:54] really doesn't provide the space that we need to achieve the physical fitness objectives that we're
[16:57] looking to achieve. The maintenance costs or repair costs and facilities due to age are increasing
[17:02] that's still still true today as I stated to you about how much we spend on the climate event system
[17:08] and much we spend on heating and electricity in the building as well and those are just those are
[17:14] large costs. There's smaller things that Nicol and Dymus so to speak every year. There's no
[17:19] separated space between the apparatus bay and living quarters which exposes personnel to potential
[17:23] exhaust fumes. You're going to hear about this a lot tonight. When we sign up for this profession we
[17:30] understand that we take inherent risk all the time. When we go to calls but we didn't sign up to work
[17:35] and live in a facility that presents us at more risk and that's what we're experiencing right now.
[17:41] Lack of on-site parking for staff vehicles and visitors.
[17:44] We've actually remediated some of that.
[17:47] We have essentially taken over the back parking lot so that it's not a community parking
[17:52] lot anymore.
[17:53] And with the new station design, we will have all of that space available for parking at
[17:57] the rear of the station as well.
[18:04] So the space program currently, the current building is 14,987 square feet.
[18:09] as you can see, projected out of 2019, what we would need in 2029-2039.
[18:16] The proposed construction, as I present it to you tonight, is 24,531 square feet.
[18:25] So there's some NFPA standards that kind of guide us along what we should be looking at
[18:30] for objectives and standards through the construction process of this.
[18:34] NFPA 1500 is the Fire Department Occupational Safety Health and Wellness Program.
[18:38] and that not only talks about mental wellness and physical wellness, that also talks about how we should have separation, the living quarters, our kitchen, our dining room, our office, they should be separated.
[18:51] A certain airflow should be controlled within the building as well.
[18:57] NFPA 1851 standard on selection care and maintenance of structural firefighting and protective
[19:01] ensembles. That clothing is our lifeline. We wear that to protect us when we're in hazardous
[19:07] environments. And it needs to be stored at a certain temperature. It needs to be stored
[19:12] in a certain light. And it needs to be cleaned when it's contaminated in an area that we don't
[19:18] work in and breathe in in a normal day. And that doesn't currently happen. We mingle with
[19:24] of this dirty equipment all the time.
[19:26] We also decon contaminated EMS equipment in the same space
[19:30] as we decontaminate this year,
[19:32] and then we store the clean gear in the contaminated area,
[19:35] because that's the space that we have available.
[19:38] And NFPA 1710, which you've heard me speak of before,
[19:41] the standard organization and deployment
[19:43] of fire suppression operations,
[19:45] this really talks about how quickly we need to be able
[19:48] to get out of the building and the building design features
[19:51] that allow us to quickly get to our apparatus
[19:53] and respond to emergency calls.
[20:00] As I said, when we take this job,
[20:01] we inherently know we're gonna have risks
[20:03] when we leave that building and we accept those risks.
[20:05] We'd like to think that we don't have to accept
[20:07] those same risks within our own building.
[20:10] And the fire and emergency service stations
[20:12] are the collection point of contaminated equipment
[20:14] for emergency scenes.
[20:15] In addition to hazards of direct skin contact
[20:17] with a contaminated equipment,
[20:19] there's off-gassing and contaminated equipment
[20:21] into the station environment.
[20:23] Firefighters have a 9% higher risk of being diagnosed
[20:26] with cancer than the general population and a 14% higher risk of dying from cancer than
[20:31] the general population. We shouldn't have to worry about that risk being affected in our
[20:37] working environment inside of our own building. The answer is the leading cause of deaths in
[20:42] firefighters. From 2015 to 2020, there were 5,259 firefighters added to the fallen firefighters
[20:49] memorial, which means that they were attributed to line of duty deaths from occupational cancer.
[20:53] or 300, 3,944 of those were because of occupational cancer.
[21:00] So that attributes to 788 deaths a year
[21:03] because of occupational cancer in the United States.
[21:06] And that number continues to climb every year.
[21:08] Are you unsettling?
[21:09] Before you move off, can you just draw a picture
[21:11] for average people who don't understand this?
[21:14] I get this question a lot.
[21:16] What's the connection?
[21:17] How does this happen?
[21:18] So you go to a flyer, right?
[21:20] It can you tell me what?
[21:20] Yeah.
[21:21] Yeah, so another contaminants end up on your clothing and things and how that gets transported
[21:25] back to the station.
[21:26] So we go to a fire and we have our protected clothing on that UCS where big boots, coats,
[21:32] helmets, all of the contaminants is particulate matter and it sticks to that clothing that
[21:37] we have and it absorbs in there.
[21:38] Well, there's places on our body that that touches our skin and that absorbs through our skin.
[21:44] When we go back to the station, we need to have a place to take that gear off before we go
[21:49] into our living quarters because if we have that dirty gear on and we go into our office space or we go into where we eat and where we do our other work, all that stuff sticks in that environment as well, we need to be able to take that stuff off and decontaminate not only the gear but ourselves so we don't transport that stuff not only out into that living environment but home with us.
[22:11] So there are two things, one, it absorbs through our skin, but also respiratory protection.
[22:17] We're much more aggressive in a modern fire service and much better about respiratory
[22:21] protection than we used to be.
[22:24] One of the things I'm going to show you is the actual area that we fill our SCBA bottles,
[22:29] our self-contained breathing apparatus, the air packs that we wear, is right behind the
[22:34] apparatus floor.
[22:35] So the diesel fumes that come in, sit in the filter for that machine and we actually fill
[22:39] our air bottles off that machine.
[22:41] So we're breathing that air in as well.
[22:44] I don't know if I answered your question.
[22:45] Yeah, so just to be clear.
[22:46] So when it's a fire, things burn.
[22:48] They take you out and they create gases.
[22:49] And those particulates end up on your clothes.
[22:52] Exactly.
[22:52] They end up on our clothes.
[22:53] And then anytime they absorb into our skin.
[22:55] When we touch those things after.
[22:57] And then of course, when you go in with an older station.
[22:58] Like we have a disk goes through the whole building.
[23:00] It is throughout the entire environment.
[23:02] So when the people go to sleep.
[23:04] Hello.
[23:05] There's blankets and they're breathing that stuff.
[23:06] They're breathing it in, especially when there's no.
[23:08] We'll talk about it more specifically.
[23:10] But when there's no air control environment, there's no air flow throughout the building.
[23:14] The particular matter travels everywhere in the building and just settles.
[23:17] We touch things, we're absorbing that.
[23:19] We think that we've cleaned it, but we're touching things and absorbing them through our skin
[23:22] because it's not controlled and it's not being in the building.
[23:25] So these are the things that when you're furniture burns,
[23:27] all these chemicals that are in your furniture,
[23:29] and it rugs and things like that in the house.
[23:32] That's the stuff that we're talking about.
[23:34] And absolutely, absolutely.
[23:40] So studies have shown that firefighters are more likely to get the following types of
[23:43] of cancer compared to the general public, I don't have to read through them, but you can see the
[23:48] different kinds. I would say that in my time in Lebanon there are two retired captains who have
[23:56] died because of cancer. There is one retired captain who had fallen cancer that is since retired
[24:03] is still alive. The former fire chief, he wouldn't mind me saying this, had was diagnosed with prostate
[24:08] state cancer, and we have an active fire inspector who is on the end stages of fighting
[24:14] and beating prostate cancer, and both all of those members spent 20 years of better inside
[24:18] of this fire station.
[24:24] So, one of the main objectives that we're talking about is what are our space needs, what's
[24:28] going on in the city of Lebanon.
[24:30] So, this was the call volume that pre and post study, public safety building study.
[24:35] So, from 2014 to 2019, you can see the call volume trend.
[24:40] And so the red is what I've added that's occurred since the study happened.
[24:45] And as you can see, we're on track, I'm pretty confident to hit 4,200 calls for service
[24:50] this year.
[24:51] So it's a pretty significant growth and I'll talk to you later on in the budget season
[24:56] about how much our call growth has grown significantly since 2007 is a benchmark that we use.
[25:01] We've actually seen a 57% increase in our call volume.
[25:08] So we'll talk about the specifics of what we're trying to fix and show you some pictures.
[25:11] And I encourage all of you if you want to come into the fire station any time so we can do a walk around show up anytime
[25:17] You're more than welcome if I'm not there my staff will be more than happy to show you around if you want to see this stuff in person
[25:23] So apparently this office stays on the left
[25:25] That we're looking at is the firefighter office
[25:29] And it's about 90 square feet
[25:31] And we have three to four usually three firefighters in there that are trying to do reports or any other
[25:37] or ancillary ministry of duties that they need to do.
[25:40] As you can see, this is directly behind the apparatus floor.
[25:43] We do have the Plinal Event System that hooks to the trucks
[25:46] for the exhaust system.
[25:48] But it's been proven that the Plinal Event's don't
[25:49] exclusively take 100% of those diesel fumes away.
[25:53] So some of that particular matter comes in there.
[25:56] We also have to keep those doors open
[25:57] and those windows open because there is no air circulation.
[26:01] We need to heat to come in there in the winter
[26:02] and we need it to be cool in the summer.
[26:04] So we're continuously keeping those doors open
[26:06] and so there's no way to really isolate ourselves
[26:08] from that space.
[26:09] The place on the left is the current captain's office.
[26:13] Those are our shift supervisors.
[26:15] They do a lot of administrative work in there.
[26:17] Same type of thing off the back of the apparatus floor.
[26:19] It's right behind there where those diesel exhaust
[26:21] cubes are and those tiles that you're looking at
[26:24] are 100% as best as tiles.
[26:28] We, the joke is we've given up mopping it
[26:31] because it's like trying to do something
[26:33] with a wet paper bag.
[26:34] You just can't fix it anymore.
[26:35] So
[26:38] in the proposed future design, you can see the firefighter in EMS office is going to go from that 90 to 208 square feet.
[26:45] You can see that it's removed from the apparatus floor and the entire building will have an HEAC system and will be able to flow air appropriately through the building and keep contaminants out of these spaces.
[26:57] The captain's office will be 233 square feet with the same benefits as the firefighter EMS office.
[27:04] This is one of the biggest things that will alleviate the concern and the anxiety we have about sitting there doing required work and not reading in toxic fumes.
[27:17] The other piece that I would like to, sorry, my screen is covered here.
[27:21] Is
[27:24] the decontamination area.
[27:27] So as I mentioned currently when we come back from a call.
[27:31] Right now we take our gear off at the scene and we put it inside of a bag.
[27:36] So that we try not to put that stuff in the fire truck the place that we're breathing in and riding all of the time
[27:41] We come back from a call we're contaminated and typically we walk through these office spaces that currently exist
[27:48] We walk through the gear room that we currently have and we're off-gassing all this material. We're touching things that are supposed to be clean
[27:56] The new proposed design would allow us to come back. We would travel down this red hallway that you see that's called the hot zone
[28:02] And that is only for contaminated people and equipment to travel down that hot zone.
[28:08] We would travel down that hot zone.
[28:10] We would enter the hot zone decon laundry.
[28:12] That's where our deer extractor, deer washer would be for our protected clothing.
[28:16] There would also be a washer and dryer in there for the uniform clothing that we were wearing
[28:21] underneath that.
[28:22] We would remove that stuff.
[28:24] And then we would go into the respective shower room and decon ourself.
[28:29] We put on clean uniforms, clean clothing, and then we could exit back into the zones where decontaminated material is not supposed to be.
[28:55] This currently is where our personal protective equipment, you hear me refer to PPE. This is where our personal protective equipment is stored.
[29:03] On the backside of this room is where the decon gear extractor washer is. This is also where we decon our EMS equipment when we come back from a call where there may be body fluids or.
[29:14] or diseases that we bring back.
[29:18] This year, one, we're running out of room here.
[29:21] They're this protected clothing costs about $5,000 a set.
[29:25] And we have a couple sets that are stored on the floor
[29:27] because we don't have any storage for them anymore.
[29:30] It also, this room, when the gear is clean,
[29:33] it's supposed to be kept isolated
[29:35] in a pressure-controlled environment
[29:37] with a ventilated room from the apparatus floor.
[29:39] So those diesel contaminants that are escaping,
[29:41] the carcinogens are not coming in and settling on that year so again we put
[29:46] that gear on and we think it's clean we're absorbing that stuff through our
[29:50] skin.
[29:51] In the back here I see the back of a fire truck and that's the open bay, right?
[29:55] That's the open bay and that's the back of the ladder truck which sits right
[29:58] there.
[29:59] You know so the ladder truck
[30:00] In what that in perspective is probably about 12 feet, 13 feet from where that room entrances are all that protective clothing is. And these trucks are at these scenes with these particular matters of landing on and now they're in this bay and close the door and open. There's nothing separating. Exactly. There is no separation there at all. Just straight open to the trucks, which is very similar to the offices that I showed you straight open to the trucks. So, you know, the critical components, the people.
[30:29] and the protective clothing that we have are directly exposed to cancer-causing materials.
[30:37] So this would be the new bunker gear storage room. Again, you can see that this is isolated
[30:42] from the hot zone, isolated from the apparatus floor, and the gear would be well protected.
[30:47] It would be in the light-controlled environment so that it doesn't break down the protective
[30:51] clothing, and we get the full lifespan out of it in a piece of mind that it's being kept clean.
[30:58] would you move the laundry from the Decon area would come out through the shower rooms to get to the bunker of your storage or back to the hot zone that's you would come out through the showers.
[31:33] This is a high, this door actually doesn't have to, both of those doors don't have to be there. There would be no reason that we would want to enter with contaminated material into those doors.
[31:44] So Holly, that was the assistant mayor, Clifton B.
[31:47] Sorry, speaking.
[31:48] That's okay.
[31:49] No.
[31:49] And Councillor Hill just arrived.
[31:51] Holly.
[31:52] Councillor Hill, the camera's on us.
[31:56] So Holly is our new recording secretary just for this meeting.
[31:58] So if you speak to state your name, if you would, it helps her because she can't see you and
[32:02] she doesn't recognize your voices.
[32:03] Great.
[32:04] Hi Holly.
[32:08] I'm the only woman.
[32:09] Hello.
[32:10] The only Karen at the table right now.
[32:14] Yes.
[32:15] Thank you.
[32:16] The apparatus floor is located directly below the administrative offices, the kitchen, the emergency
[32:21] administration center, the training room and also the bunk rooms. So, again, these trucks start
[32:27] the hot air from the diesel fumes, rises. It goes up through, we have the poles that come down through
[32:32] from the second floor, the fire poles, all of that stuff travels up into the sleeping quarters,
[32:38] up into the eating quarters, up into the training quarters. My office is there, the assistant chief's
[32:43] office there. The administrative assistance office is there. Public health office is up there.
[32:48] So it's not only the people on the floor, it's every employee in the building is exposed to these
[32:52] toxic carcinogens that travel throughout the building and sit there that we touch and we absorb.
[33:00] Again, the future apparatus floor, as you can see, is the single story section that would be out
[33:05] on the front. All of the rest of the living quarters, offices and everything would be on the rear of the
[33:09] building. You have complete separation. Complete separation from the apparatus
[33:14] floor to any of the critical areas that we've talked about thus far. You have
[33:17] overpressures of how you keep that area. So the apparatus floor would have a
[33:21] ventilation system and then everything that is in the administrative side back
[33:26] would have again overpressure a pressurized environment so that we keep the
[33:30] contaminants from the outside from coming into those areas. We'd also be able to
[33:34] close doors because we'll have appropriate cooling heating ventilation system
[33:38] within those office spaces that we don't have now.
[33:44] Current door height is 11 feet. This is the picture
[33:47] of our current ladder truck that is on a good day probably 10 inches tall. You have to back that
[33:55] truck in very slowly and drive it out very slowly because if there's any bit of bump on the lip that
[34:01] goes into the bay, you can see how close it is. I mean, it literally is this much difference between
[34:05] the top of the ladder in that apparatus floor. When that truck sits in that day,
[34:10] the cooling and heating pipes that are also in the building and the rear of the building with
[34:14] that sits, there's about this much room between those on the top of that ladder truck.
[34:18] And this is what I was talking about about apparatus becoming bigger and our building was not built
[34:22] to accommodate those apparatus.
[34:27] The new doors would be 14 feet high, which is the standard right now
[34:32] and would give us even more room to grow
[34:35] should we experience that in the future.
[34:40] This is a picture of the long lock
[34:42] that I take every day up the stairs.
[34:44] I'm still gonna continue to use the stairs
[34:45] because I need to, but we aren't ADA compliant.
[34:49] We're not welcoming, we're not open to anybody
[34:52] that may wanna use our meeting room
[34:53] or anybody that needs to come in
[34:55] for fire prevention meetings or administrative meetings.
[34:58] We have to hold those meetings in a different location
[35:00] if we know that there will be ADA challenges
[35:03] that we'll have to deal with.
[35:10] I don't know if there was a code then, but yes, absolutely.
[35:14] So this is a picture with the elevator off the public lobby.
[35:17] There would be an elevator there.
[35:19] Again, would be a public access elevator.
[35:24] That would be the main entry, which would actually our entrance now.
[35:28] Just the main entry door is not ADA accessible.
[35:31] This door would be designed to be ADA accessible as well.
[35:33] So bathrooms and locker rooms, this is a picture of the second floor.
[35:39] This is where we ask our female employees to have their locker room.
[35:44] And this is also used as a multi-gender bathroom as well as shower facility.
[35:51] Again, on the second floor.
[35:53] So we come back from these calls that we're talking about.
[35:56] We travel to the second floor.
[35:58] And we're all of the living quarters are the training quarters, eating quarters.
[36:03] spreading those contaminants around to get our clean clothes and we walk in and take a shower and now we've contaminated everything around us.
[36:10] The only thing that I assure you doesn't happen here is our protected clothing does not end up on this level.
[36:16] We took a stance on that quite some time ago and try to do the best we could to eliminate that.
[36:21] But our workforce as far as female employees continues to expand, which is a very positive thing.
[36:26] We have some rock star employees, and this is not a fair space to ask them to share with the rest of the organization.
[36:38] So the new facility would have separated male and female locker rooms.
[36:42] Oops, was very quick. Sorry about that.
[36:45] As you can see, we have the appropriate space, we have lockers in there,
[36:49] and we have much more user friendly facilities for our entire organization.
[36:55] So this is the current EOC and training room they're outdated and lack the space and technology to meet the needs of the community of the size.
[37:03] When we have a natural disaster or a big event that affects the city, this is where the leadership and the command team meets.
[37:09] This is where we make decisions of how we're going to fix things whether it be a hurricane, a flood or any other man made event that may occur.
[37:17] one, it's embarrassing quite frankly for me to have members of not only the city staff
[37:24] but members of the public come into our room and look up at the ceiling and see this.
[37:28] The storage in the room as you can see is disgusting at best because we don't have any room to put stuff.
[37:35] And this is supposed to be one of the most sacred, professional, high-tech rooms in the city based on what we do in there.
[37:41] And we don't have the ability to accomplish that right now with what we're looking at.
[37:44] But not to mention it's right above the apparatus floor.
[37:49] As all of you know, we've expanded our scope for a community health program.
[37:53] We have a full time community paramedic and two part time community nurses.
[38:00] This is their office base that they share, which also serves as the backup dispatch center
[38:04] for the city.
[38:05] So if the dispatch center up at the police department for some reason went down and over
[38:10] is able to help us out, but this is where our dispatchers would relocate to.
[38:13] the dispatch police and fire emergencies.
[38:16] Also, if there is a large scale emergency event
[38:19] that we talked about where the EOC was open,
[38:22] we may back in a dispatcher to come and sit here
[38:25] and work out of here.
[38:27] But we have three people that are involved in community health
[38:29] that are out in the community every day
[38:30] that share that one desk
[38:32] because we don't have any other space for them right now.
[38:38] The new design, we'd have a new state-of-the-art
[38:41] emergency operations center
[38:43] and we'll talk about some other stuff at the end,
[38:45] but this is one of the particular rooms
[38:46] where there is lots of state money available for grants that we can be reimbursed for the cost
[38:52] of building the emergency operations center.
[38:56] We'd have a backup dispatch center located directly
[38:59] off the emergency operations center.
[39:02] And there would be offices of the arrows covered
[39:05] side there for mobile integrated health. You can see it's a much bigger space and would accommodate
[39:09] the community of paramedic and the three nurses to have their own space. They do teleconference,
[39:14] They do phone calls. Occasionally patients will come in and meet them there. Obviously, they're more of an out on the road style, but they currently we don't have the ability to have those options for them.
[39:26] So
[39:29] this is our alarms ring.
[39:32] The picture on the left, if you look in the in the back corner, that is the digitizer or the form for where our master box system, our municipal fire alarm system, the fire alarm boxes.
[39:44] that protects billions of dollars of infrastructure in the city that's where it
[39:49] records to is right there. This other picture in the back one as you can see
[39:54] there's the blue cables run along the ceiling and run down. That is about 90% of
[39:59] the city's phone and fiber infrastructure that comes into our building. We
[40:04] cool that room with a window-sized air conditioner and we heat it with nothing.
[40:10] So, all of that critical city infrastructure is exposed to hot humid temperatures, dampness,
[40:17] and we have had issues in there.
[40:19] We can't keep an air conditioner in there without freezing it up or blowing it up.
[40:24] Also the city, one of the, the fire station is one of the main city radio antennas and communication
[40:30] centers for the city.
[40:32] If that goes down, we've quickly learned that, and recently, that anything downtown for
[40:38] law enforcement or police have difficulty transmitting if that system goes down.
[40:42] And this is the space that we currently keep it in.
[40:47] The new proposed building will have an IT server room storage for just the IT equipment,
[40:52] so the fiber, the phones, and any of the computer network system that we need for our organization
[40:57] as well as the citywide infrastructure.
[41:00] We have a separate telephone and fiber room, and we'll have a separate electrical room
[41:04] so that we can keep this all organized and clean and up to code like it should be.
[41:09] and we protect the city infrastructure.
[41:13] So the current energy efficiency gaps, as I've mentioned,
[41:16] there's no HVAC system, there's no solar,
[41:20] there's little to no insulation in the walls,
[41:22] those are brick walls.
[41:24] In the summer, the brick walls, if you go in
[41:26] and touch them from the inside of the building,
[41:27] are extremely hot because they absorb the sun,
[41:30] which makes the inside of the building warmer,
[41:32] which makes our little 10,000 or 5,000 BTU air conditioners
[41:35] that we have 13 of in the building
[41:37] work extremely hard throughout the winter.
[41:40] And in the winter or in the summer and in the winter, the walls are very cold.
[41:44] And again, there's one thermostat that controls all of the bunk rooms upstairs.
[41:50] And it's a constant game up and down, up and down, up and down with those thermostats.
[41:55] There's no electric vehicle charging infrastructure, which is very important for us to move into the future with that.
[42:01] I mentioned the 12 portable window unit air conditioners.
[42:03] I actually think there is 13 or functioning heat zones and poor energy building envelope.
[42:10] I actually had a discussion with Councillor Bielo many years ago and we were talking about
[42:13] putting windows in there about how I felt like we were trying to put brand new windows
[42:18] in a wet paper bag and how it was just we had to do it because the windows were in terrible
[42:23] condition but we were trying to do it the most cost effective way we could for what we were
[42:26] working with.
[42:30] So the proposed energy upgrades would allow solar system to be installed that would be that's
[42:35] part of the build process, part of the initial budget.
[42:38] We want to get going right away with solar
[42:39] and try and serve the energy and move
[42:41] into a more efficient building.
[42:43] You can see the two solar farms that we would have up there.
[42:47] We would have the HVAC air handling units
[42:49] in the two separate parks, the apparatus,
[42:51] separate from the living quarters and administrative offices.
[42:55] We would have two vehicle charging stations out back
[43:00] or city employees or vehicles if we needed out back.
[43:03] And there would be vehicle charging infrastructure actually built into the apparatus floor.
[43:08] If at some point we reach the time where we have electric fire trucks or smaller fire apparatus or vehicles that we would charge inside the building.
[43:16] We want to put that infrastructure in ahead of time so that it's ready to go so that we aren't digging up the floor to reinstall this down the road.
[43:23] We know that's the future. That's no, we know that's where we're headed.
[43:29] Additionally, we'll meet or exceed most the most current New Hampshire energy code will incorporate key pump technology. We've been working with the city energy coordinator to come up with some unique ideas for that and installation of infrastructure that will assist us and working toward a net zero energy building.
[43:48] So location, I've sat in front of you before as well as the former fire chief talking about where's the best spot for this and why why are we looking to stay right where we are.
[43:59] So just a recap and I know all of you have heard this before but in 2000 from 2018 to 2021 we looked at 11,383 incidents that happened in the city of Lebanon.
[44:10] and currently from our two fire stations where they're located, we were able to get to 59%
[44:17] of those calls within national response times based on where our location of our station is.
[44:23] One of the other proposed sites that we looked at for this main fire station,
[44:27] the central fire station was a little heater road. If we do our heat mapping study again,
[44:32] we would see a 14% reduction of our coverage area from where the current station is we're talking
[44:37] about right now.
[44:41] Altable of art was another place that we looked at because that end of the community is rapidly
[44:46] growing and our power volume is increasing pretty steadily in north of Etna Road.
[44:51] And I use the Etna Road border as a statement because that anything beyond that, I can't
[44:58] achieve any response times that we're-
[45:00] We're trying to achieve in that right now, just because of the travel distance. So if we were to move our central fire station there, we would see a 20% reduction in our current coverage ability right now.
[45:12] We talked about Hanover Street extension in the former brickyard as well. There was an opportunity there that we had looked at, and that would result in a 15% reduction of coverage from where our current station location is.
[45:27] So, yes, Council V. Lovergan, the 15% reduction, is that like 15% of the total or a 15% of the base amount?
[45:46] So it's a 15% of the, so the first slide that I showed I'll go back.
[45:50] Yeah, so when you're in 20, are you talking about dropping from 40% to 20% yes 20% of 40% no it's dropping
[45:58] The total that you're correct would be losing in terms of correct. Correct. That's a little bit important
[46:05] So moving on to the the site plan the overall site plan the fire station would be in the same footprint that it currently exists
[46:14] And I'll show you be a three story building. It'll be a little bit further back into the parking lot
[46:19] the ramp would be very similar size to what it is right now and there's still
[46:24] be the small sidewalk along the church street.
[46:29] Sorry these pictures are a
[46:30] little distorted. I did the best I could with them but this is kind of just the
[46:33] 30,000-foot view if you will of what the first floor would look like. We have the
[46:38] apparatus floor and then we have the captains and the firefighters administrative
[46:42] offices, the turnout gear room, full storage areas, our air compressor room. We
[46:50] We could actually put our SCBA compressor in that we fill our air bottles with that would
[46:55] be kept separate of the diesel contaminants, so we're not putting diesel contaminated air
[47:00] in the cylinders that we breathe out of when we go to a call that we do now.
[47:06] The second floor would be the living quarters, if you will.
[47:10] There will be a fitness area, there will be the kitchen area, very similar to what we have
[47:15] have now the locker rooms and there will be a small laundry area up there as well.
[47:23] And the third floor would become the EOC, the administrative offices.
[47:27] So the fire chiefs office, the administrative office, we'd have an additional meeting room
[47:31] up there, the EOC, the backup dispatch center would all be up there as well.
[47:36] The reason that that's laid out like it is, is we want the operations area to be closer
[47:41] to the apparatus floor because they need to be out the door of the quickest on calls.
[47:44] and the administration, they don't walk me,
[47:47] quick out the door on call.
[47:48] So that's why we're up on the third floor.
[47:51] But that's best served.
[47:52] And now that we have the elevator,
[47:53] the third floor is accessible very easily to the public.
[47:57] And again, I apologize for the quality of these pictures.
[48:00] We did the best we could on a PowerPoint,
[48:02] but I'm more than happy to share the true images with you
[48:05] if you want to see those at some point.
[48:09] So this is the conceptual design for the outside of the station.
[48:12] This is a front view.
[48:13] to basically looking from right in front of the church.
[48:17] And this is off church street looking
[48:19] to the rear of the building.
[48:22] So be a side view of the building.
[48:25] So be on the church street as well
[48:27] as the middle of the market side of the building.
[48:30] Question from Mayor McNamara.
[48:31] Yes.
[48:32] So you're going from just under 15,000 square feet
[48:35] to just over 24,000 square feet with a new building.
[48:40] So about a 10,000 square foot increase.
[48:42] but you're on essentially the same footprint.
[48:45] Is the third story allow you to do all that?
[48:49] Or is the footprint actually increasing on that?
[48:51] The footprinting is,
[48:53] the building will be a little bit longer
[48:54] into the rear parking lot where we are right now,
[48:57] as well as the third story is where we make up
[48:59] the difference in the increase.
[49:04] This is a picture basically facing the rear of the building
[49:07] and then facing the front of the building
[49:09] or the conceptual design.
[49:13] So the overall benefits,
[49:14] We reduce the risk of occupational disease and death to our employees as well as the citizens that may choose to use our building.
[49:21] We have a couple conference rooms in the proposed design that would be open for public meetings, small groups, whatever need be in there.
[49:29] Increased room for immediate staffing needs. You've heard me say that the call volume is growing, our city is growing and we're going to need more employees.
[49:38] reduced energy and consumption, ADA accessible, that's very important to us, we
[49:43] want to be ADA accessible, we need to be, we need to be co-compliant.
[49:48] A modern emergency operations center, emergency management and preparedness is
[49:52] very important to us, it's a very important part of what I do every single day,
[49:56] and we don't have the proper facilities to manage that. And the central
[50:00] station would be located in the most appropriate location to meet the response
[50:03] time objectives that we currently have.
[50:10] So obviously we would have to move ourselves
[50:13] to make this happen. So the administrative personnel, which would be the assistant chief,
[50:18] myself, the administrative assistant public health and fire prevention, we have an agreement to move
[50:24] into the third floor of the Lebanon SAU building with some vacant space that they have there
[50:30] and the operation staff and equipment. So the ambulance is the fire tracks that people
[50:34] to do the work every single day would be relocating down and sharing space down at public works
[50:40] with a combination of offices and temporary structure down there for storage of equipment
[50:47] but on property that we own and it would actually leave a benefit because we're going to do some
[50:51] site prep down there it would leave a benefit for more space for the public works department
[50:55] in their facility for parking and equipment storage as well when we vacate the facility.
[51:00] So
[51:04] this is just a rough outline of the project budget and, again, we have the project management
[51:08] company.
[51:09] If you have more detailed questions about that online with us, I've broken into professional
[51:13] fees, construction costs, owner costs and permits.
[51:17] And I can go through it line by line for what's here.
[51:20] But if you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer those as well.
[51:24] The total project request that we're looking at for this is $22,669,936 dollars.
[51:37] Obviously, like we do with any massive project of this size, I've already been having discussions
[51:42] with our grants group here with Rebecca about seeking any grants that we can for energy
[51:48] efficiency or the EOC, as I mentioned, or anything that we can do to save the taxpayer money,
[51:55] we are going to aggressively go after those.
[51:57] I can't tell you what all of those are right now because some of that data hasn't been released.
[52:01] Some of those applications aren't open, but is a primary objective of us to do that and
[52:06] be aggressive and out in front of that now.
[52:08] Yeah, part of this. We'll need to final design before we can get the is rebates involved.
[52:12] As you know, it's same thing with city. Oh, we got rebates and those things are now.
[52:16] They had the IRA program and what they have final designs to be able to submit those for funding or
[52:21] twice. So the rough timeline right now, as proposed is
[52:25] December of 2023. I will be seeking your official approval for the project.
[52:31] January of 24 will start the final design process.
[52:34] July of 24, we would be relocating and vacating the current station into our
[52:40] temporary homes. August of 2024, demolition of the current station would
[52:45] begin. September of 24, September, October, the new construction process
[52:50] would begin with a target date for us to begin the new building by December of
[52:56] 2025. Obviously, we all know we've been around long enough, the construction like
[53:01] that sometimes it doesn't fall in that timeline, but that's what I have for you at this point
[53:05] right now.
[53:09] I don't have anything further in the presentation.
[53:12] You've seen the spreadsheet in terms of debt service payments. I provide that to you so
[53:17] you can look at that as we normally do with these projects.
[53:23] Yes, I'm sorry. Councillor Wolzen, then Councillor Sykes.
[53:34] I just wanted to point out, too, because it was part of an important consideration for approval of this new building.
[53:43] And that is that much of the research in terms of health concerns for firefighters and people who engage in that type of work is longstanding.
[53:56] but there's new research being conducted that is not fully complete yet, but it does begin to
[54:04] broaden the picture in terms of the risk that our city employees take. The most recent one,
[54:11] for example, is that there's a Massachusetts study that indicates that there's a high correlation
[54:17] between that and Parkinson's, which needs to be more fully explored, but I mean it's just,
[54:24] We don't even talk about that yet because the research is finished and there are some other things as well, so I'm not diminishing the cancer risk.
[54:34] It's huge, but there are others as well.
[54:37] And I think that has to be part of our discussion.
[54:40] Thank you.
[54:41] Councillor Woodlesy.
[54:42] I have a short one.
[54:45] Yes.
[54:46] That's very real.
[54:47] Thank you.
[54:48] For the temporary relocation.
[54:50] Yep.
[54:52] What's the plan for overnight facilities?
[54:54] So the temporary relocation would be we'll say three units.
[55:01] There'll be a temporary structure put up for our fire apparatus,
[55:05] just the storage of the apparatus, the equipment,
[55:08] and then there will be job trailers, essentially,
[55:11] but there are living quarters with a kitchen, shower, bedroom facilities,
[55:15] and then there'll be an office trailer as well.
[55:18] So that will be how that site would be set up.
[55:21] Yeah. Okay. Is that in the budget? That is one of the proposed budget. Yes.
[55:26] Thank you. Yes. Councilwoman, please. Alright, and we're all going to be shocked. These are financial questions. So sorry, you said you spent right now, you're spending what like five half a million a year on repairs and maintenance to the existing fire station.
[55:38] Not half a million. No, the plan event system was about $5,000. Oh, okay. Yeah.
[55:45] Overall, our cost, which so it's about $5,000 with a plan event,
[55:49] propane is about $30,000 a year, electricity is about $25,000 to $30,000 maybe up to $40,000 a year now.
[55:56] And there's other costs as well.
[56:06] You mentioned also so like because the lack of like control where you're storing your gear, it sounds like it's,
[56:12] there's just additional kind of breakdown in the equipment.
[56:15] So like do you have a sense of like is that like you're losing like one year of useful life three years like what is that so I can't quantify that worry what I can tell you is that protective clothing is is good for 10 years is what the manufacturer says so every five years we keep two sets of year every five years we buy a new set the environment that it's started now is not what the manufacturers recommendation is unfortunately I know it breaks it down but I can't
[56:45] I want to find out the number of how much it breaks it down.
[56:48] All right.
[56:49] So I mean, because it sounds like you're probably
[56:51] stretching it out as far as you can.
[56:53] We absolutely.
[56:54] So like from your perspective, how often are we replacing it
[56:58] to the 10 years, and you're just taking that?
[56:59] Yeah, so for example, our fighter gets hired.
[57:04] They get two sets of one set of turnout gear.
[57:07] Every five years, so that gear will last for 10 years.
[57:12] They'll get another set, so they're staggering.
[57:14] So every five years we're buying a new set of turnout here so that the firefighter only has one set that's reaching the 10-year mark. It's never older than 10 years.
[57:24] It's safe to say that they just have to make it work.
[57:28] They have to make it work and we know because of the manufacturer's recommendations, we know because of studies that the year is not stored properly and it is breaking down.
[57:37] I don't want to give you a quality because I can't define that for you.
[57:41] And then the other thing I think of too is right, like we talked about this for the capital purchases of the trucks right the ladder and the engines.
[57:48] Like how much are we do you remember like how much are we spending extra on that because we don't have the like 14 foot clearance.
[57:56] So truck two, which is our ladder truck out of station two currently that truck had to be modified when we bought it in 2013 to specifically fit into station one.
[58:08] I actually contacted the vendor a couple of weeks ago to get that number and that at that time it cost us
[58:17] 117 or $118,000 to modify that truck and the price of fire trucks the value of fire trucks is increased by 38% since then
[58:26] So to put it in perspective were you know, we're four million dollars in modifications to make a truck to fit into that fire station
[58:44] Councillor Sipes, again, with that point that you just made chief, I would also point
[58:51] out that even to get that modified ladder truck into the station, the ramp had to be torn
[58:59] up and rebuilt so that the for proper angles, and that's not a safe ramp as far as that goes.
[59:10] So obviously the new building I presume will have a approach that will make the ladder truck fit in without any of that.
[59:19] Up and down.
[59:22] Answer Hill.
[59:26] Yeah, Councillor Hill.
[59:29] How about station two because we've been also talking about that.
[59:34] So can you talk about that?
[59:36] Yeah, quite honestly both stations are in need of replacement for the same reasons space health and safety concerns as as you know we've worked for a couple years on trying to find a location and we weren't able to find an appropriate location.
[59:50] We proposed a couple ideas and just kind of didn't make any progress on that and we need to keep the momentum going and my objective is to provide a.
[1:00:00] A safe, healthy working environment and build for the future. And I saw an opportunity for station one. So we've chose to do that now. But station two is in still in dire need. They both are in dire need. Station one has a very large impact on daily operations just because there's more people in that station. But station two is is in rough shape, to say the least.
[1:00:24] there to say that it's not going to make it until 2045 the end of our debt
[1:00:28] service on this station. No.
[1:00:33] Are there is there a sense of how much of the
[1:00:37] project cost might be defraired by state grants or by any of the inflation
[1:00:41] reduction act or other dollars that are out there? I don't have that number yet. A
[1:00:46] sense of that only because again we haven't been to final design to have the
[1:00:50] final, you know, the final plans and the final energy efficiency study done on it to understand
[1:00:56] that. We worked hard to try and get some of that information, but I don't have a figure that I'm
[1:01:01] comfortable throwing out there for you at this point. Maybe we'll have a little more information by
[1:01:06] the time budget comes around, do you think? No, because we have to do the final design. No, I know we
[1:01:11] have to do final design, but are there, do we know if there are even streams, like are there grant
[1:01:17] opportunity. Yeah. So, you know, we'll qualify at least by the present rules as we understand them 30% reimbursement for that.
[1:01:26] Okay. That's a tax credit program and they have a lot of municipalities and we don't pay taxes. We get that money back for the solar system that are in there.
[1:01:32] I mean, our heating systems and air conditioning systems are so iniquly that we're going to be able to get rebates like we did for city hall.
[1:01:37] They can qualify for that. We did pretty well with that here.
[1:01:40] So we're going to get those, and then the EOC grants to the NPEG grant is actually a
[1:01:45] separate one just for EOCs like everybody else.
[1:01:48] We're going to be able to get some grant money to be able to do that.
[1:01:50] It's not going to appreciably reduce this cost on this tail there right now, but it's going
[1:01:55] to help to offset some of that.
[1:01:57] But we're not, you know, we're not talking the mains of dollars.
[1:02:02] It's probably hundreds of thousands of that range is the most likely hoe that we would get
[1:02:07] from those.
[1:02:07] because again, there's no insulation, I mean, whatever we do is going to be
[1:02:11] improved.
[1:02:14] And so then, can you talk a little bit about what this does to our
[1:02:19] other capital projects given our policy about our debt policy? I would suggest
[1:02:28] that we save that for the 18 because I'm going to have charts because it gets I showed
[1:02:33] three councils the other night. Last night, as a matter of fact, we didn't have
[1:02:36] anyway, I just kind of gave them a glimpse of that.
[1:02:40] What would you do in very well,
[1:02:42] so people, I mean, reason to come and talk to us
[1:02:43] so I'm going to ask you.
[1:02:44] Clearly, that's the message.
[1:02:46] It'll probably be different
[1:02:47] when the other two counties are on West Web and they're
[1:02:50] against it.
[1:02:52] So anyway, it'll make a lot more sense
[1:02:56] if I provide you with that context
[1:02:57] because there's a lot more than pieces.
[1:03:00] As I was explaining to three counts,
[1:03:01] I have to be able to put this in a format
[1:03:04] that you could absorb.
[1:03:05] And that's not questioning your intelligence is to so many pieces to that one side fund balance and then how that is spread out the changes in the rate of our tax based growing all those sorts of things have to be factored and you'll see that what that looks like at least theoretical picture what it looks like based on the projections that we have.
[1:03:23] That is fair to say that it eats up the majority of our capital.
[1:03:27] I'm sure it was the next 20 years.
[1:03:30] Oh, sure.
[1:03:31] Well, at least the next value 26 for that four years,
[1:03:35] the striker provision would kick in.
[1:03:37] And we're going to make some decisions about that.
[1:03:39] So I'm saying so.
[1:03:40] I need to show you need to see that graphically,
[1:03:42] and it'll be easier for you to absorb, I think.
[1:03:45] Sure.
[1:03:47] Councilor Sykes.
[1:03:50] Councilor Sykes again.
[1:03:51] So while we're on that matter of costs, etc.
[1:03:56] I want to make sure I understood your slides.
[1:03:58] So, this building is designed at least for 2029 expectations or is it beyond that?
[1:04:07] The space for a program.
[1:04:11] And we're actually about a thousand square feet over what the study.
[1:04:15] The reason I bring that up is I did some a little bit of research about the existing fire station which was built in 1954.
[1:04:25] forward. It was very interesting to me to see that there was a lot of community conversation
[1:04:32] about how it was too big and too expensive and totally unnecessary. And yet we got what,
[1:04:41] 70 years out of it. I mean, and things are not going to get cheaper as we move forward.
[1:04:48] So I just as we have these financial discussions, I think we need to keep that be mindful of the fact that good planning on our part is just that planning for the future.
[1:05:02] That was a big battle.
[1:05:03] Well, yeah, it was a thing in the news forever, seemed like that was Councilor Heistid speaking
[1:05:11] calling.
[1:05:12] Councillor Hilligan, and I'm sorry, but it was probably at the beginning.
[1:05:16] What is the expected life of the new fire station?
[1:05:19] Well, there's no to fine timeline, but we're building a station that's going to be at least
[1:05:24] 50 years as well, we're expecting to get out of it, so probably 70 or 80, realistically
[1:05:29] right?
[1:05:30] Right.
[1:05:30] And there will probably be improvements along the way as time goes on.
[1:05:36] Councilor Woodles.
[1:05:37] So Councillor Woodles see so not directly related to the fire station funding but you know as we look at our capital improvements program.
[1:05:46] What you know do we have other funding streams related to that that we can go after.
[1:05:51] You know I think of like some of the work we're doing in West lab and other parts that have been you know funded through those congressional appropriations or other grants.
[1:05:59] it seems like that, like are we, you know,
[1:06:01] I know we've been more aggressively going after grants,
[1:06:03] but it's possible to also, you know,
[1:06:05] do so in other areas knowing it's not as possible
[1:06:08] for the fire station, which will fund through debt.
[1:06:13] We, you know, we can certainly apply for
[1:06:15] a congressional, a congressional spending grant,
[1:06:16] but then they're not popular enough for those to be successful.
[1:06:21] It's the things that, you know, that are at the forefront
[1:06:26] of the public interest, housing, right, and childcare, and those sorts of things that are getting funny, and it all depends on what happens in the next few years, it may be a different issue, energy, you know, the IRA grants.
[1:06:40] Those are the things that Congress is trying to focus on and try to solve those particular issues, so that's where they're targeting that money.
[1:06:47] They used to be money in the safe program for fire station, but there's not a whole lot and that
[1:06:52] Was it much that was there weren't so many fire stations that received those kinds of funds
[1:06:56] So what you do have is you seem like to upgrade your emergency operations center fire equipment
[1:07:02] PPE
[1:07:03] Firefighters and we'll be talking about that in not tonight, but very soon
[1:07:08] That's where they're
[1:07:11] Congresses but it's safe to say there's other funding like because again, we're talking about you know
[1:07:15] we're going to trip that circuit breaker.
[1:07:17] You know, we can defray some of those.
[1:07:19] Instead of delaying some of these other capital expenditures,
[1:07:22] we know we have to make.
[1:07:24] We would be able to find certain other sources of funds
[1:07:27] for those because we're going to spend our,
[1:07:30] you know, essentially trip our debt ceiling on the fire station.
[1:07:35] I guess I don't.
[1:07:36] And we're saying it.
[1:07:37] So like, you know, I guess the concern,
[1:07:39] if I'm hearing you correctly, Councillor Hillis,
[1:07:42] is what are we going to forego doing?
[1:07:45] because right, but I think, you know, I guess my question is more like, you know, knowing that we are going, you know, we're trying to focus on this, you know, like assuming we go forward with this request and, you know, what that means for our other fiscal decisions that we have to make, I guess my question is more is, you know, some of that I think it's not that it will necessarily be a full stop.
[1:08:08] It's just that it's going to force the city to look more aggressively at other funding sources for some of those other
[1:08:15] projects that don't have
[1:08:18] you know
[1:08:18] Fire station does not have
[1:08:20] External funds in the way that some of these other projects do. Yeah, so in that context
[1:08:25] You'll see when we present the CIP there's a list of unfunded projects
[1:08:29] Okay, the parking lot of projects that are not funded that list gets bigger. Needless to say okay
[1:08:34] There are some things that I don't even on the list
[1:08:36] I mean, you look at the streets over here, green street, all that, all those need to be reconstructed and there's just simply no money, no plans to presently do those.
[1:08:45] If you remember, when we had our last contract negotiations with all of the unions, the unions agreed to no step increases in 2023.
[1:08:54] agree, because we were expecting the fire station to be approved over in West London that didn't happen, so we actually restored those and as you know, the world has changed the labor cost.
[1:09:05] I would not be going back and asking them to do that again, right, because we would just simply lose around the cost of labor has gone up dramatically in that competition. So that's not going to be an option.
[1:09:14] and I have no intention of going to request that.
[1:09:18] But they agreed to that.
[1:09:18] All the unions agreed to do that.
[1:09:20] Understanding that the situation that the city was in.
[1:09:24] And you're gonna see the GWI, the COLA,
[1:09:28] Virginia one is only 1.8%.
[1:09:30] And you know out there with the cost of food
[1:09:33] and everything else is out there, that's not catch.
[1:09:35] So they're already losing ground there on that.
[1:09:38] So I have no intention of trying to find the funds that way.
[1:09:42] It's going to be a difficult road.
[1:09:44] So again, I'll get into more of this.
[1:09:46] We've had, I've been in the last five years
[1:09:48] and we have had the advantage of the people
[1:09:50] that some of you would hear that before I got here,
[1:09:53] the very strong financial plan
[1:09:55] that build up the cities on a signed fund balance
[1:09:57] to deal with the debt spikes that occurred
[1:09:59] and we're able to keep the tax as well.
[1:10:01] We're gonna be going into a different era
[1:10:02] and I've been talking about this for a while
[1:10:04] on a signed fund balance is going on
[1:10:05] so they don't have that hedge to be able
[1:10:08] to produce the tax rate, right?
[1:10:09] So what's likely to occur is a combination of things.
[1:10:13] tax rates increasing in services going down.
[1:10:15] That's just the reality that I think that our future is,
[1:10:19] and we're gonna have to make the best of that.
[1:10:21] As you know, projects like this,
[1:10:23] very similar to this project,
[1:10:25] City Hall renovation took 14 years to go through.
[1:10:27] It's that other two points, something million dollars
[1:10:30] and we finished at 7.1, right?
[1:10:32] The cost does not go down and only goes up.
[1:10:34] And this cost, we expected to build a fire station over here
[1:10:38] for about 15 million dollars two years ago.
[1:10:40] Now we're at almost 23 the cost of construction has gone up just out of control and it's and and discussing with the building of social
[1:10:48] Intra building association builders and developers that demands not going away
[1:10:54] Right, and there aren't enough construction workers to do that especially that's more acute in this region than anywhere else
[1:10:59] The cost of construction is much higher here than in a lot of places
[1:11:03] You're looking at something similar what it is in Boston for a whole variety of reasons without going too far off track
[1:11:08] I think you want to focus on questions about this facility, but we're going to get into all of that because that's that's the difficult decisions that the council is going to have to make it we all recognize that and we're going to have to make some tough choices and that's what of course you get paid the big dollars to do.
[1:11:24] That's right, you don't get paid at all. Anyway, I hope I answered your question a little bit.
[1:11:28] I think it'll make more sense as Council of Hill was asking trying to find out more about that understandably so
[1:11:34] I get to provide you some context and I showed the three councils it basically an Excel spreadsheet
[1:11:39] But so many numbers that's not gonna work
[1:11:41] I'm gonna have to show you in charts and things like that so you can appreciate and get a better idea
[1:11:46] I know for you. Yeah, it's about to say I love those Excel spreadsheets and I spent more of my time on that
[1:11:51] But mere mortals like the rest of us though we need to see things graphically to be able to understand them so and that actually is a nice
[1:11:57] I said go into something else wanted to bring up.
[1:12:00] So, you know, chief Wheatley,
[1:12:02] like in the kind of the past few years,
[1:12:05] what is our vacancy rate for firefighters
[1:12:07] who are in the EMTs run for the city?
[1:12:10] So we are very fortunate here in Lebanon right now
[1:12:13] that it's a desirable place to work.
[1:12:15] So we haven't had any vacancy rates.
[1:12:18] It's the problem we are experiencing,
[1:12:19] it's not vacancy, it's not a problem.
[1:12:21] Right, the work's emergency right now.
[1:12:23] So we're filling jobs when we have vacancies.
[1:12:24] We are starting to see the qualification levels of entry level people significantly lower, which is costing us more money to invest in them forward.
[1:12:33] So in the past, how many applicants would you get compared? How many applicants you get today?
[1:12:36] No, it wasn't 10 years ago. For one position, we'd see 40 to 50 applicants. And when we replace the three retirements last year or three positions, we had some applicants.
[1:12:48] So it's safe to say though that the hiring market for firefighters is just increasingly
[1:12:54] getting more and more competitive and would it be fair to say that a, you know, redesigned
[1:13:02] and overall, you know, I don't know the right, I'm not going to need the right current,
[1:13:06] but some of it's, you know, sufficient to meet all of the health and safety requirements
[1:13:10] and needs for those firefighters would be a considerable selling point in hiring people
[1:13:17] It would be very desirable.
[1:13:19] Yes.
[1:13:19] I think the most important thing is they don't want to die from cancer.
[1:13:22] And you're going to appreciate, I'm sure.
[1:13:24] I wasn't sure how to find the words to say that.
[1:13:26] So I do appreciate you saying that.
[1:13:29] But that's exactly my point.
[1:13:30] I mean, I think there's a component of this that I don't want to get lost in just the pure dollars and cents, which is.
[1:13:36] There's a cost to the city for not being able to fill these positions because people don't want to work in that firehouse.
[1:13:44] Right.
[1:13:44] And so I think that's, you know, as we start looking at these costs and you weren't worried about the capital.
[1:13:50] They hit to the capital agreement program. I mean that to me is, you know, what's the cost we have to rebuild the city from another fire?
[1:14:01] Yes, Council.
[1:14:03] I just want to make it clear that I am very supportive of this project, you know, I think.
[1:14:10] We've gotten a lot of use out of the existing fire station and we can be very thankful for that and it's
[1:14:21] I am glad that as chief you're bringing this to the table and it is a major endeavor and but I think it's the right thing for us to do to be addressing this.
[1:14:34] So, you know, from the health and safety of the people who work for the city, who I think are entitled to work to have safe working conditions, a safe as they can be, and it's a it is an occupation that comes with a certain amount of risk, but we owe it to them to do our part.
[1:14:58] And I think this is also.
[1:15:00] Smart in terms of planning for the future, as Councillor Sykes was pointing out. And it's only going to become more important that our emergency operations are capable of handling what is coming our way in the future. It seems that climate change is only going to put more pressure on our resources. And so I think for all of these reasons. I just want to make it clear that I I support this.
[1:15:29] you know, I think we'll have more discussion, but I do think this is the right direction for us.
[1:15:37] There's a raised hand. That's Sarah Riley. Yes, Sarah Riley.
[1:15:42] Thank you. Yes, Sarah Riley Ward 2. Thank you for this presentation chief Wheatley. I just
[1:15:50] am wondering if there's a graphic to show the four minute response time
[1:15:58] in map form for the temporary setup during construction.
[1:16:07] There actually is not one, but I can have that prepared reasonably quickly to provide that information.
[1:16:14] Sure. Do you have the numbers, like offhand, like is it equivalent, you know, is it?
[1:16:21] There would be a slight delay or reduction in response time or increase, I should say,
[1:16:29] in response time.
[1:16:30] You know, we're moving a mile and a half down the road.
[1:16:33] Fortunately, we have quick access to the highway.
[1:16:36] And it's a pretty quick access back into the town where the heart of most of our call volume is.
[1:16:41] So we would see a slight increase in response times.
[1:16:45] However, I think a lot of those response times would still be met within the
[1:16:49] four-minute objective because many of the responses that we're responding to from
[1:16:53] our current station were well under the four-minute time frame.
[1:16:56] Thank you.
[1:16:59] Is there anyone in the audience who has any questions as we begin to wrap up here?
[1:17:05] Anyone else on line?
[1:17:07] Anyone else on line?
[1:17:10] Councillor Heist.
[1:17:12] I wanted to thank the fire department and acknowledge the support that you've been to
[1:17:17] the community in a wide variety of ways.
[1:17:21] One of which was the Lebanon and Club had a racing program that I was coaching.
[1:17:27] I had 47 kids racing back in the 80s and lo and behold we had no snow.
[1:17:34] And we utilized the top floor for dry land training entire winter.
[1:17:40] and it was the godsend for the kids to be able to actually get in shape and thank you very much for what you've done for the community in lots of ways.
[1:17:51] Anything we can, and that's what we want to do, it's what we're here for.
[1:17:55] Councilor Sykes. Yeah, actually chief, I had Councilor Sykes. I have, as you make your plans to temporarily relocate, I assume that part of your...
[1:18:09] planning will make sure that you can reduce environmental risks in terms of the many
[1:18:15] of the problems that you face at the station.
[1:18:20] I guess I need, I'm not sure what.
[1:18:22] They're going to be important.
[1:18:28] The temporary structure for the vehicles is a completely self-standing separate building from
[1:18:34] the living quarter units that we would have down there in the office units.
[1:18:37] And for my final wrap up, I would like it to be very clear that I'm fully in support of this concept as well actually it's overdue.
[1:18:52] The city has a lot of pressures that we're trying to deal with here as a city council but I tell people that we are punching way above our weight and we're going to continue to do that with.
[1:19:06] If this project as well, I hope.
[1:19:13] What else?
[1:19:14] Okay.
[1:19:15] Thank you very much for the presentation. Very, very helpful.
[1:19:18] If you think of anything else that you want to know about before,
[1:19:21] we've got some time here, obviously, December 18th.
[1:19:24] Just get it to us and we'll get the information.
[1:19:27] We will put together just a chart just to show what that looks like,
[1:19:30] the chart that Sarah was talking about.
[1:19:32] Just to show what the change is to show you folks know that.
[1:19:36] And then, again, anything else you can think of, just get a hold of us and we'll be glad
[1:19:39] to provide it to you so you can help me make your decision.
[1:19:41] Please stop in the station if you wanted to or of a CM person.
[1:19:44] The order I was open.
[1:19:46] And we had the holiday debut here of the Chiefs.
[1:19:49] So there's a video on our website.
[1:19:50] If you have not seen it yet, if you take a look at that.
[1:19:54] And he will sign autographs later on, if you would like those.
[1:19:56] 30 seconds.
[1:19:58] We have to raise almost 23 million dollars.
[1:20:00] So there is a cost to those autographs.
[1:20:02] As we talk about funding sources, that's one of those that we might do.
[1:20:05] So that is available for folks, and obviously that was intended for the public to better
[1:20:09] understand the situation that we have, but certainly for you as well.
[1:20:12] And thank you for your time.
[1:20:14] Thank you very much.
[1:20:15] Thank you.