BERNARDSTON — Congressman Jim McGovern visited with town officials and firefighters on Tuesday afternoon during a tour of the new Fire Station that he helped secure $1 million in federal funding to support, emphasizing the need to invest in community safety.
Both McGovern and Christopher Lyon, state director for southern New England with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development program, came to the Fire Station to celebrate the funding, which McGovern secured through a fiscal year 2024 earmark. Tuesday’s event included a tour of the 6,320-square-foot building at 167 Northfield Road and a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“We ask our firefighters to run toward danger when everyone else is running away,” McGovern said. “The least we can do is to make sure they have a safe, modern place to work and the resources they need to protect themselves while protecting all of us.”
The Fire Department has been operating out of the station since March 2025, having moved from the former station at 18 Church St. after years of planning for a new location came to fruition. In July 2023, Town Meeting voters authorized the purchase of the roughly 24-acre property, which was formerly the home of Raymond’s Repair, for $1.6 million.
On top of the support of taxpayers, a $1 million USDA Community Facilities Grant was secured for the purchase of the parcel, reducing the burden on residents, according to Bernardston Town Administrator Lou Bordeaux.
Bordeaux explained that the idea for a new Fire Station had been a goal in Bernardston for several years. The effort had experienced a previous pitfall in not qualifying for funding from an FY18 Massachusetts bond bill, but Bordeaux said McGovern wasn’t deterred.
“He came to a meeting of our Fire Station [Expansion] Committee in Bernardston, and while the Selectboard was inquiring about funding for the Fire Station that had been promised in a previous Massachusetts bond bill, Congressman McGovern looked me right in the eye and said, ‘You’re going to get your Fire Station,'” Bordeaux recalled. “So today’s really the culmination of all that.”
Lyon noted that the station serves 2,102 residents, and the facility is spacious enough for firefighting equipment, vehicles, training and office work. The previous station, built in the 1970s, was about one-third the size at 2,378 square feet.
Lyon also described the funding picture as a “strong example of partnership and shared investment” between the federal funding and local allocations.
In speaking to the importance of this new facility, McGovern noted his personal commitment to first responders, harking back to a five-alarm fire at the Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Co. building in 1999 that occurred after he was elected to Congress.
McGovern explained how that experience drove him to get federal support for firefighters, supporting the Assistance to Firefighters Grants via the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), created in 2001. He said that when the Community Facilities Grants were brought back in 2021, he knew the Bernardston Fire Station would meet his goal of supporting projects that strengthen communities and tangibly improve people’s lives.
While this project is a bright spot, McGovern said more federal support needs to come through to protect first responders, and to make sure there is money from both federal and state sources to upgrade infrastructure in small communities like Bernardston.
“We want to make sure that we not only have facilities that can accommodate all the current needs of our fire departments, but we want to make sure that the equipment that our firefighters have is safe and state of the art and up to date,” he said.
Fire Chief Peter Shedd said Tuesday’s ceremony felt like it provided “closure” to those involved in the longstanding project. He noted that the $1 million in federal support “made it an even better deal, considering the total cost of the purchase for the new facility and what the department was able to gain from it.
“You look at it now [with] the $1 million, this was a $600,000 purchase,” Shedd said. “What we’d get for $600,000 was unbelievable.”
