State of the City 2022: Emergency Services Facilities

 

Tuesday's presentation included updates on the city's plans for both the new RCMP detachment to be built at the corner of McBride and Third Avenue East; as well as the early stages of planning for a new Fire Hall for the Prince Rupert Fire/Rescue Department.

The new Detachment structure led off the review, the Mayor tracing some of the history towards the long running process of getting the proposed new building to the finish line.

"OK, another challenge, the RCMP station. 

Gina Garon's in the audience right ... she knows all about this issue, because this is a twenty year issue and it's no fault to the councils I would say.

The problem with this situation has been, the RCMP has never agreed on the location, anytime there was a location brought up, they didn't like the location, there was new rules after 9/11 on where you know police stations can be located and there was this big back and forth for years about location. 

And eventually you know we met with the Commissioner he came from Ottawa we just said look you're either gonna build a station underwater,  or you're gonna find a location.

This is another mandated project, we have no choice in the matter to do this. 

They can go ahead and build this themselves at any spec they want and send us the bill and we would be forced to pay for it and so in our view having control over the location and the design allows us to control the cost.

If you look at Prince George for example, they build a super fancy RCMP station it cost  well over 60 million dollars. That wasn't our approach on this, as Councillor Niesh would say, no fancy lines on the building" 

Mr. Brain then outlined the scope of the Loan required for the build and some of the timeline towards completion.

"We just completed the Loan Authorization, for 25 million dollars, this will be up to 25 million dollars costs. 

We've already put the money aside for the loan, I'm going to talk about that after, there might be a small tax increase next year to finish off that, it's going to be about 1.5 million a year ish payments for the loan. 

But this was something that we had no choice on, so that's the location we managed to work a deal out to do a bit of a land swap drop the cost of acquiring the building, the old Jehovah Witness building and its all going to come down ... it's going to be built you know reasonably at a budget that this community can handle. 

And so that's gonna be a project that's finally moving forward and it's one of those challenges that we just had to take care of"

The details towards a new Fire Hall are not quite fully developed as of yet, the Mayor providing for a bit of a heads up to what the city has in mind for the Fire Department over the next few years.

"The next one, which we haven't talked about before is our Fire Hall. 

Our Fire Hall has seismic upgrades that are needed, it's in a very poor location, it was built in the fifties, and it wasn't built to today's standards and we actually have to custom order Fire Trucks so they can fit into the actual  bays ... this has to go basically, unfortunately.

So now we're in the process of that, we've been doing some site surveys, we've been doing some initial designs and probably next year you'll hear more about what's gonna happen with Fire.

You know we have a lot of Industrial growth actually happening as well, discussion with the industry that they're going to need more  fire suppression opportunities, so Fire/Emergency service is gonna be a big part of this community's growth  and we need to set up for the future and this is just one of those have to haves as well.

And you know none of this, the reason why  I'm putting all of this first, is cause that none of this anything sexy about this, there's nothing fun about it, there's nothing exciting about it, this is just the weight of this town, and I'm hope you're feeling that weight that we feel sometimes"

The two Emergency Service theme elements of the presentation can be viewed from the City's Video replay of the Sate of the City Presentation.

The New Detachment notes start at the 33  minute mark

The proposed new Firehall themes can be reviewed at the 35  minute mark

Our Major Projects Archive page has much of the background towards both developments as they have progressed over the last few years.

Our Full overview of the State of the City Presentation can be reviewed here.

We also have created an archive of the elements from it, that compilation is available here.

(all above images come from screenshots of the video presentation)