City Selects Consultant To Help With Fire Station Site Search

The city's quest for a new fire station took a step forward on Monday night, when the Inver Grove Heights City Council selected an architectural firm to identify potential sites for the proposed building.

The council voted 4-1 to hire DLR Group/KKE to conduct a $22,000 location analysis study, with Councilor Bill Klein casting the lone dissenting vote. The firm was the top pick of a committee of city officials and firefighters, who recommended DLR Group/KKE over nine other candidates that submitted proposals to the city.

The firm's strong reputation and experience in conducting location analyses swayed the committee's opinion, Fire Chief Judy Thill wrote in a memo addressed to Mayor George Tourville and members of the council.

"Because of their experience in this area, there was no doubt that all bases would be covered, we would get the exact product we needed from the start and we would be given a quality product that could look out into the future," Thill wrote in the memo.

Continued growth on the northwestern and southern edges of Inver Grove has driven the need for a third fire station in the city, Thill said earlier this year.

The city-wide average response time for the fire department is just under eight minutes, Thill has said, but firefighters frequently take 10 minutes or more to respond to calls on the southern end of Inver Grove.

A new station would decrease that respond time to areas of the city by as much as three minutes, officals have said. It could also impact on the city’s ISO rating — a ranking that affects insurance premiums for property owners. The ranking, based on a 1 through 10 scale, takes into account a city’s public safety infrastructure, including fire hydrants, equipment and vehicles and other factors. The lower the ranking, the better the insurance rates.

The city began the hunt for a new fire station site in January, when they put out a call for consultants to help the city determine the best location for the proposed station. City Administrator Joe Lynch said earlier this year that the location study could take as much as five months to complete.

But Klein, who voted against hiring the firm, questioned the cost of the study and the need for a consultant to help the city determine a location for a new fire station.

"I’m just baffled by this whole process," Klein said at Monday's council meeting. "We have a committee, we have maps...why can’t that committee and staff members identify the sites, why do we have to go out and spend $22,000?”