City officials gave the okay to spend up to $2.1 million on the site, located at 850 Pannell Street NW on April 11.
Grand Rapids Assistant Fire Chief Eric Freeman said the property has not been officially purchased yet and still needs to undergo feasibility and environmental studies, as well as other assessments.
He said the site is ideal for a new training facility and has enough space for other operations.
“We could potentially even have our fire cadet program... run out there, our building and our fleet maintenance could have offices and we could store a fire apparatus there,” Freeman said, “so, there’s a number of multipurpose types of features that could go along with this property that we could use it for.”
According to a city memo, the fire department has multiple non-emergency operations spread throughout the city, and many of those facilities are poorly designed and inadequate.
In addition to being a site for a new training facility, the fire department plans to use the property on Pannell Street as a consolidated location for many of its operations. The property, according to the same memo, will provide enough space to meet the fire department’s needs for the next 50 years.
Freeman said acquiring the land is the first step in the building process and adds the department is still in the early design stages of what the facility could look like.
“It’s going to take a little bit of time [to build the facility] but we are the second biggest fire department in the state, we’re accredited, and we are an ISO (Insurance Office) rating of one, we really pride ourselves on doing a good job and this new building would give us a lot of resources that we would need to continue being the type of fire department that the city needs,” Freeman said.
The green light for the purchase of the property comes two-weeks after the city approved $500,000 for the fire department to build a new station in the city’s Third Ward. Fire officials said the addition will help cut response times in that area.
