Fire Department and citizen advisory group pick site on Edgewood Road NW for new west-side fire station

CEDAR RAPIDS - The City Council-appointed Fire Station Relocation Advisory Committee unanimously agreed on Tuesday with the Fire Department's assessment that a vacant 3.13-acre parcel of land on the northwest corner of Edgewood Road NW and Crestwood Drive NW should be the new home for the $2.8-million, west-side district fire station.

The Fire Department and City Hall have been working on plans to build a new west-side district fire station in tandem with plans to build a new east-side Central Fire Station on First Avenue East to replace the flood-ruined one at 222 Third St. NW.

The committee now will take its recommendation to the City Council, though committee member Don Karr, a City Council member, told the committee that some on the council want to change the proposed site of the Central Fire Station. Such a change could have an impact on the site for the new west-side district fire station, he said.

Fire Capt. Andy Olesen told the advisory committee on Tuesday that the Fire Department's in-house evaluation team reviewed a total of 11 possible sites for a new west-side station before selecting the site at Edgewood Road and Crestwood Drive NW as the one to recommend to the advisory panel.

Olesen said the Fire Department's standard is to have a fire station within one-and-a-half miles or within a response time of four minutes of every property in the city. However, the department has had one significant “gap” in those standards - centered at O Avenue NW and Edgewood Road NW - that the proposed site for the new district station would fill, he said.

According to the Fire Department statistics, the Edgewood Road NW site at Crestwood Drive NW will bring an additional 8.93 square miles of the city or 12.5 percent of it within one-and-a-half miles of a fire station under a fire-station alignment that includes a new east-side Central Fire Station.

The other two sites considered by the department's in-house evaluation team for the west-side station were on Rogers Road NW and at Wiley Boulevard and Crestwood Drive NW.

Other sites removed from consideration for a variety of reasons were 4201 Ellis Rd. NW; the east end of Windfall Drive NW; Jackson Park NW; Crestwood Drive NW, southeast of 38th Street NW; 2330 F Ave. NW; E Avenue NW and Wiley Boulevard NW; west of 26th Street NW and K Avenue NW; and Edgewood Road NW near Olde Hickory Lane NW.

The $2.8-million, west-side district station has received a $1.6-million state I-JOBS grant. The city also expects to use $900,000 in property-tax dollars on the project and estimates it can sell a district station at 1424 B Ave. NE for $300,000. The B Avenue NE station, the city's oldest, won't be needed if the Central Fire Station is built nearby in the 700 block of First Avenue SE, which has been the plan.