'It's been a long, long road to get to this point.' Groundbreakings for firehouses slated

Springfield Fire Chief Brandon Blough said a lot of people have told him over his two-and-a-half year tenure that the firehouse building project would never get done.

The city built its "newest" firehouse in 1996 and people have reminded Blough of that.

So while Wednesday's groundbreakings for Station 6 at 11th and Ash streets and Station 8 at Rickard Road and Lawrence Avenue are ceremonial in nature, they have a deeper meaning for Blough.

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"(People said they wouldn't get built) because it's such a process," Blough said after Tuesday's committee of the whole meeting. "You're talking about large buildings. It's difficult to go in there and convince people these are necessary, these are things that we need, these help us respond to folks in our city."

The city council committed to just north of $20 million for the construction of three firehouses across the city.

Station 13, which will be built just on Spaulding Orchard Road west of Illinois 4, is a firehouse addition. The two other builds replace existing firehouses.

The groundbreaking for Station 13 will most likely come sometime later in the year, Blough said, though it is being built in the same time frame as the other two stations.

That station particularly will address more lagging response times in the city's southwest corridor where the city has grown population-wise, Blough said.

Stations 6 and 8 have had their own backstories.

The tract of land for the new Station 6 is the former Honeywell-Hobbs property. Hobbs produced controls, switches, lighting systems, battery indicators and meters for the transportation industry before shutting down in 2010.

Blough insisted the city did its due diligence to make sure everything was checked out on the site environmentally.

"Obviously, (Hobbs) was there prior to this and we wanted to make sure there wasn't anything in the ground that would make anyone sick," he said. "The last thing that anyone would want to do, myself especially, would be to leave a legacy of something that somebody had to worry about. We're going above and beyond what needs to be done to make sure that's not the case.

"That's a neighborhood if we didn't utilize this piece of property, it may have sat there vacant for a long time. I think it's going to spark, hopefully, new interest. It's going to give that neighborhood something shiny and new to be proud of."

Station 8 takes crews further west and addresses a knotty traffic situation, Blough said, with the house being located so near the highly traveled intersection of Monroe Street and Chatham Road.

"That's not well located due to traffic concerns, so it's going to make everyone safer as far as having firetrucks going through that intersection and moving it further west," he said.

The location of Station 13 will "make sure we have some more evenness across the city as far as our response times," he added.

Mayor Jim Langfelder, whose term is winding down, said he hoped the building of momentum could continue, most urgently with a new training center/firehouse on Stevenson Drive and the relocation of the firehouse from the Illinois State Fairgrounds to either Sangamon Avenue or Dirksen Parkway.

The nearly 30-year drought in building, Langfelder acknowledged, "is pretty significant, but that's how government operates. When you get money, they just kind of go to town on things. Fortunately, we had a double-edged sword, so to speak, where we had good fiduciary implementations which built up the city's fund balance during the COVID-19 pandemic. We slowed up spending, then we had the (American Rescue Plan Act) funds. But we were planning to do a fire station regardless of the pandemic. We were heading that direction."

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Langfelder admitted it will feel good to see shovels in the ground next week, though it's not to point he wanted it.

"I feel the public's frustration at times because I've tried to push internally as hard as possible with regards to the fire stations," he said. "I felt it never should have taken this long."

"It's been a long, long road to get to this point and I'm very happy to get to a more physical portion of it," Blough said. "For us to get to this point, this is one more step to getting heavy machinery in there and moving stuff and doing the actual labor we need to do to get these closer to being open."

Contact Steven Spearie: 217-622-1788, sspearie@sj-r.com, twitter.com/@StevenSpearie.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: The city will break ground on two new firehouses next week