What They’re Thinking: North Liberty Fire Department’s next steps

NORTH LIBERTY — North Liberty residents will vote this fall on a 1 percent local-option sales tax that would direct a portion of the revenue toward a new fire station.

The proposed project, estimated to cost between $15 million and $18 million, calls for the city’s only fire station to be demolished and rebuilt. This comes after the fire department put plans for a second station on hold due to staffing concerns and structural inadequacies at the existing station.

  Buy Photo

The City Council has yet to make a formal decision on how the city will move forward on the fire station project, and construction likely would not be completed until 2026 or 2027.

Earlier this year, the North Liberty City Council approved an agreement to spend $270,000 to buy a piece of property directly behind the existing fire station, at 25 W. Cherry St., to allow for station expansion. The purchase came just a few years after the city bought land near Centennial Park for a second fire station.

North Liberty Fire Chief Brian Platz recently spoke with The Gazette about the fire station and the department’s future. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: What about the current fire station doesn’t work for the department?

A: The way I kind of explained it to not only the city administrator, but to City Council is that it's kind of a three-prong approach with emergency operations, infrastructure and then day-to-day efficiencies around the department. When you think of a fire station, you think of deployment and emergency operations, right? One of the big things that I see as an issue is right now, our facility is not big enough to replace our ladder truck. We have a ladder truck that's 23 years old. It's a 75-foot ladder, and it's at the bottom end of capability, just simply because our community has grown so much in 23 years, we have well over 117 buildings in town that are four stories or higher, and depending on the setbacks to those buildings, our ladder truck cannot reach the roof. We are as a department, kind of at the ceiling of what we can do for the community until we get a different facility, in which case, then we can expand our trucks and our training. We have a bunch of spare gear in an office, because we have no storage here. As that gear sits, it continues to (emit) gas, volatile organic compounds, etc., because most of our gear has been in fires. So it is very, very hazardous and unhealthy to be breathing in that environment, sure, but we have no other place to put it.

With regard to infrastructure, we have some issues with water coming and going in the building. Our water line is a 2-inch water line coming into the building. Most residences are bigger than that, and so when we go to fill firetrucks with water after an incident, it takes forever to fill the trucks. That's not a huge problem in the summertime, when we can go out and tap a hydrant, but in the wintertime, when it's cold, you don't want water flowing outside. The building doesn’t have sprinklers. We have millions of dollars of fire suppression assets sitting out here and if we were to have one fire, the community's fire protection is gone.

We get into the day-to-day, with regard to meetings and office work and things like that, there's also other challenges. We recently, within the last couple of years, started having people stay here overnight. We built four dorm rooms out of a larger room that was never designed to be dorm rooms. We don't have a conference room in this building for meetings, so anytime we have an officers meeting, we either all have to pile in my office, or we go to our training room. Our training room serves as our kitchen, and it serves as a hallway that goes to the engine room. The only way to get to the engine room is to walk through the training room. When it comes to responding or getting paged out, navigating the entire station to get to the truck really exacerbates their turnout time, which we try to keep as short as possible. A large portion of the station is not ADA compliant. I would like to correct that, because I think it's important that the public comes to the fire station, they see their fire protection equipment, their facilities, their people.

  Buy Photo

Q: There’s been plans to modify the station to stay here long term. Where are we at in that process?

A: What I'm suggesting to city staff is to redo this facility, and our interest is to completely tear it down and to rebuild it. We believe that what we can do is time or stagger the construction so that we can still provide the service out of this existing facility. There was a time not that long ago that we were kind of going toward building a second fire station. As I continue to evaluate who we are as a department and our capability, I think our best direction is to redo this facility first to give us a really solid foundation to work from to increase that capability, with regard to our ladder truck, with regard to our rescue equipment, and then from there we expand our footprint. I'm a firm believer that we need to be better as a fire department in providing our service before we stretch ourselves so thin between two different facilities. I also think that we need to have a little bit more time to exercise our staffing plan for this facility, before we expand into a second facility.

Q: What does the current staffing plan for the department look like?

A: We're working hard to continually up staff. We have a staffing plan that every year we're taking little steps forward. Right now, we're at seven full-time people. Three of those full-timers are administrative, so it's myself, the training officer and the fire marshal. Then four of those positions are operational positions. Three lieutenants, one per shift between three shifts, and then we work 24 on, 48 off. This last July, we hired our first full-time firefighter. And so every third day we have two full-time people here, the other two days, we just have one full-time person here. We have 16 part-time members, and we have to navigate the fact that one of our shifts has two full-timers, and the other two only have one full-timer. We try overnight to fill three positions, minimally, and we always try to have three people here during the day. We’ll staff two people in addition to administration. We also have a contingent within the department that we call “pay per call.” We're down to about 25 “pay per call” members, and those members carry a pager.

A good segment of those “pay per call” folks spend time here, and we pay them a stipend (thanks to grant funding). ... It's like $100 for a 12-hour shift. The city has funding to pay them per call. So in addition to their stipend, they're also getting paid if they go out on calls. The unfortunate thing about that is you may go on one call, you may go on eight calls. You don't know. At least we have the ability to pay them a minimum stipend for being here. ... Our people are our biggest asset. The trucks, the equipment, the gear doesn't matter if we don't have people to send out the door. ...

Those “pay per call” members, the role that they're fulfilling today is allowing this department the ability to grow slower from a financial standpoint and that's key. I can't express enough the gratitude I have for our volunteer “pay per call” members. They're providing a wonderful service for next to nothing. I think the other thing a new building would do for us is really allow us to recruit that segment of our department. Because again, when you walk into this place and you see how inadequate it is, it doesn't excite people. I don't want the community to lose sight of the fact that these “pay per call” members are saving the city a significant amount of money each year by not paying them a salary. So maybe investing those funds into a facility in order to continue to prolong or to use that type of person or that type of responder would be a good thing.

  Buy Photo

Q: What does the call volume look like?

A: In 2024, the department responded to 1,793 calls for service. This year, the department is on pace for 1,900 to 2,000 calls. The other important statistic to talk about is the fact, as call volume increases, so does the potential to have multiple calls at the same time. At night, when we're just staffing one truck, three people minimum, there's a good chance we could have a second call at the same time. ... Right now, we're at 18.5 percent of the time when we have two calls at the same time.

... I don't think we're necessarily at that critical point where we have to start looking at a second crew. At some point we will, which will then have us start talking about that second facility. I think these statistics are really good to keep in front of us so that we can continue to plan and talk about where we go from here. I think we have a little bit of room left. That's why, again, I'd like to get this facility done first that would really improve some of our other capabilities.

Q: What’s next for the department?

A: We talked about staffing, I'm going to continue to ask for full-time people, whether or not the city has the ability to do that. Historically, they've worked with us on that because we've been able to show the need. I think we've already talked a lot about the recruitment piece, and we're going to continue down the path of trying to be a combination fire department (with a mix of volunteers and full-time staff), as long as we can. The building will take a significant amount of time coming up. I hope the City Council is able to say yes to that, because I think it's going to help us in so many different ways. And then once that building is built, then we have to look at the capability piece. We have to look at that next ladder truck, that next rescue truck, and with those pieces of equipment comes more training. So that's coming in the near future, hopefully shortly after the building, and then beyond that, as we watch our statistics we'll look to a second fire station.

Comments: megan.woolard@thegazette.com

Get a weekly roundup of Johnson County news by signing up for my Johnson County Update newsletter.