Some emergency employees in the city will be working a lot more closely together if council approves a $7 million plan Monday night.
The money would go toward the rebuilding of the Neebing Fire Station in its current location and the construction of a new fire hall somewhere in Westfort.
But the plan also calls for renovating the current Brown Street Station to be used as an Superior North EMS facility and expansions on the James, Vickers and North Central fire stations to house ambulances and paramedics.
“The idea is to improve our response times, especially in the EMS service. We have reasonable response times in that now but we think we can do better and we need to do better,” emergency services manager Greg Alexander said.
Alexander said the point is to make the services more efficient on a cost basis as well. But it’s not about integrating the services he added.
“That’s absolutely not what we’re trying to do. We believe in the shared facilities but there’s been no discussion nor any move to do any amalgamation. In fact, we’re making sure we keep the two services separate,” he said.
While the report does mention a “resistance to change” that might arise from sharing space, Alexander said he believes the two emergency services will work well together.
“I think anytime you put groups together it’s a change and so you get some issues that pop up but we think that in putting these groups together we’ll work out those issues and over the long term I think it will work out very well.
“I fully expect that these are reasonable people who will work together and as long as we respect their individuality in terms of needs of the two groups I’m confident we can make this work.”
Alexander said he has informed fire and EMS unions about the plan. About $1.2 million for the plan will come from an existing EMS budget, while another $5 million will be taken from the rate stabilization fund with the additional $1 million to be found within the 2012 budget.
Alexander said he hopes to see construction by 2013. Reports on the final budgets of the build and design will be separate reports for council along with the site selection for the new Westfort station.
