WARWICK — The new fire station will be finished by the end of the year, Fire Department Chief Ron Gates says, but only if Warwick votes to take ownership of the building at Town Meeting on May 7.
Since March 2016, the Warwick Fire Department has been working out of two buildings. The training room, communications room and office are in the old building on Hastings Pond Road that the Firemen’s Association built in 1952. But the department’s six fire trucks are housed in a new building on Orange Road, which the Firemen’s Association built in 2016. The old building can only fit two trucks.
The plan had been for the new building to house all of the Fire Department’s operations. But the Firemen’s Association only had enough money to build the “apparatus bay” where the trucks are stored. The foundation for the rest of the new building was poured last fall, and there are plans to pour the concrete floor within the next month. After that, the association will be “pretty much broke,” Gates said.
The problem is, the new building was built by the Warwick Firemen’s Association, not by the Warwick Fire Department. Almost all members of the association are members of the Warwick Fire Department (except for a few former firefighters who no longer work for the department), but technically the two groups are different legal entities. The association is not officially associated with the town of Warwick while the department is part of town government. But the association owns the new building.
The association had been using fundraisers like its annual spaghetti supper to purchase materials for the new building, and members had been volunteering their time to build it. Most of Warwick’s firefighters have backgrounds in professional construction. The old 1952 building was likewise built with association money and labor, then subsequently donated to the town of Warwick. The association has also donated numerous fire trucks to Warwick over the years, Town Coordinator David Young said.
Warwick has funds set aside for the new fire station, but cannot give that money to the association. Before the town can use those funds for the fire station, it must first vote in Town Meeting to accept the donation of the building from the Firemen’s Association. Young said that the Selectboard had been hesitant to accept the building, for fear that it might have been poorly built, and the town would then have been saddled with the responsibility of maintaining a problematic building. However, he said, it is the Selectboard’s opinion, after seeing the apparatus bay, that the association’s new building meets modern standards of construction.
Once the town has taken ownership of the building, it could contract the rest of the construction work to an outside party, but it would have to pay union wages. The other option is that the town could pay its own employees their normal working rate to finish the construction. Warwick has used that technique before: the Highway Department has worked on the town’s broadband project under a similar arrangement. If the town was to agree to take over fire station ownership, it can pay Fire Department workers their normal wage to work on the building — as they already had been, in their capacity as Fire Association members — and it can finally use the funds that it has already set aside to pay for materials.