The Spokane Valley Fire Department says it plans to construct a new fire station at Liberty Lake to replace one on the north side of Interstate 90 that’s not as ideally located for responding to calls.

The new Station 3, also called the Liberty Lake Station, will be built on a 1.1-acre parcel of land the department owns at 21300 E. Country Vista Drive and is expected to cost about $3 million, says Support Services Deputy Chief Bruce Kroon, who is in charge of facilities.

The department plans to seek general contractor bids for the project shortly, Kroon says. ZBA Architecture PS, of Spokane, is the architect for the project.

The new station will have a 10,900-square-foot main level, with an additional 960 square feet of mechanical and storage mezzanine space. It will include three drive-thru apparatus bays, seven dormitory rooms with a kitchen and living space for crews, a self-contained breathing apparatus room, a personal protective equipment room, and an emergency medical technician supply storage area.

The breathing apparatus room will support the entire fire department, meaning that whenever they have breathing equipment that they need to have fitted, tested, or worked on, they’ll go to Station 3, says Melanie Rose, the department’s community affairs officer.

The personal protective equipment room, just for Station 3 use, will include an extractor, basically a large washing machine for all of the clothing worn by crews while fighting fires. Rose says the department gradually is updating all of its 10 stations to include such equipment as part of a push to reduce firefighter exposure to carcinogens and other toxins so they are healthy when they leave firefighting service. She notes that the cancer rate among firefighters is high. Kroon says having such a room to keep protective equipment out of the sunlight and other elements when not in use also should help it last longer.

He says the station will have an exterior look that’s designed to blend in with the surrounding area, included different-colored masonry facades, wood trim accents, and a seamed metal roof.

“I think it’s going to have a good look,” he says.

Rose says the department has been planning for the project for a while, setting aside money from its levy funds to pay for the station’s construction, and therefore won’t need to seek fire district patrons’ approval of additional funding. 

The current Station 3 has just one three-person engine company crew, but the new station is being designed to accommodate two crews, plus one other person, for a total of seven employees, she says. 

“That means in the future when demand warrants, we can serve twice as many residents with a second crew and engine, without incurring the cost of building another station,” she says.

Several of the department’s 10 stations are built to house a second crew, but the only station that currently has two crews is Station 8, at 2110 N. Wilbur Road in Spokane Valley, she says.

Kroon says the department would like to have at least the concrete pad poured for the new station before winter weather arrives. He says it needs to be out of the current station by December of 2017, because that’s when Liberty Lake Sewer & Water District is scheduled to take over the current Station 3 property at 2218 N. Harvard Road.

That station, located just west of the Liberty Lake sewage treatment plant, was built in 1996. The sewer and water district originally sold the fire department the half-acre site where the station is located for $2,000 and agreed five months ago to buy it back for $2,001, and to buy the fire station building for its appraised value of $505,000.

BiJay Adams, the sewer district’s general manager, says the district plans to convert the fire station into a lab and operations building for the treatment plant. The plant occupies the westernmost portion of a 40-acre, pie slice-shaped parcel of land the district owns that’s bounded by Harvard Road, Indiana Avenue, and the freeway.

The Spokane Valley Fire Department, the more commonly used name for Spokane Valley Fire Protection District No. 1, serves an area of about 75 square miles that includes the cities of Spokane Valley, Liberty Lake, and Millwood and surrounding unincorporated areas of Spokane County.

It employs 199 people, including 177 uniformed personnel—12 of them new recruits—and 22 others, 18 of them full time and four part time. It operates on a 2016 budget of $35.3 million, which is up 3 percent from the prior year.