The joint police and fire station will be a “demonstration project” that will help inform a 20-year master facilities plan, which is expected to include the replacement of some public safety facilities, Dickstein previously said.
“Our newest station is over 30 years old — almost 40 years old — and our oldest is over 100 years old,” she said last year. “And our population has changed a lot, as it relates to density ... and our stations aren’t necessarily located in the right place for the best response times.”
The Dayton Fire Department is analyzing its fire and emergency medical services data to help create a 20-year station relocation master plan, said fire Chief Jeff Lykins.
“We’re in the process of doing that now and it should be done by year’s end,” he said.
The Dayton Recovery Plan calls for the city to use about $11 million of its $138 million in federal COVID rescue funds to create a new joint police and fire station in northwest Dayton.
Last month, the Dayton City Commission had a first reading of an ordinance that would authorize the city to buy a commercial property at 184 Salem Ave. for $2.8 million.
But Dayton withdrew its offer just a couple weeks after the first reading, shortly before a deadline the city had negotiated with the owner, said Dayton Deputy City Manager Joe Parlette.
The city pulled out of the deal — which was months in the making — in time to get its $50,000 deposit back, Parlette said.
The nearly 65,000-square-foot Salem Avenue building has lots of space and parking and is in a good location, Parlette said.
But he said an inspection revealed that the building would be very expensive to renovate and retrofit in order to meet the needs of its public safety forces.
“It checked a lot of boxes for us, but I’m confident that we have the creativity and expertise with various city departments ... to be able to come up with a workable location in a desirable geography,” Parlette said. “We are looking at other sites.”
The former school building went to auction, and it’s not immediately clear what its future might hold.
The proposed new joint police and fire station is meant to improve emergency response times in northwest Dayton, and the new facility should have community space as well, said Dayton fire Capt. Brad French.
Dayton’s newest fire station was built in 1985, while the oldest was built in 1939, fire officials said.
Dayton’s police stations were built between 1954 and 1991.
Some police stations were not built for a public safety purpose and do not have infrastructure capable of supporting the newest technologies, said Dickstein.
Lykins said the fire department’s data analysis means the city won’t have to guess about where its stations should be.
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