One of two new Longmont fire stations opens

LONGMONT — After months of delay, the first of two new fire stations opened Tuesday in Longmont, while the other facility has yet to be put into service.

Firefighters at the new 11,246-square-foot Fire Station No. 2, at 2212 17th Ave. just east of Hover Street in northwest Longmont, responded to their first call at 1 p.m. Tuesday, according to Robin Ericson, spokesperson for the Longmont Department of Public Safety.

The new Fire Station No. 2 is one of two that were built simultaneously for the city. A new, 11,246-square-foot Fire Station No. 6, at 501 S. Pratt Parkway in south Longmont, rose on the site of the old station, which had been built in 1971.

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Scott Snyder, the city’s assistant fire chief for logistics, told BizWest last year that Fire Station No. 6 would likely be up and running in July and Station No. 2 would likely open by August. but Kerry Sheahan, senior project manager, said Thursday that construction issues had delayed both projects.

At Fire Station No. 2, she said, “a lot of it had to do with critical punch-list items that were not complete, and we would not take ownership of the building until they were. It wasn’t a lot of things, just a few critical things.”

A leaking roof has been the main issue at the new, 11,246-square-foot Station No. 6, Sheahan said.

“They’re going to replace the roof, but right now there is an insurance claim with the contractor and their subcontractor, so it is left out of our hands,” she said. “We don’t know when we’ll get it open, but they have patched the leaks, so we should still be able to move in with those patches, probably in the next few weeks.

“Once we get the OK from the contractor,” she said, “then Scott has to schedule some of our vendors to move in things like radios, furniture, GPS, the alerting system and other equipment. All of that has to move in at the same time on the same day so we don’t disrupt services to the city.”

Fire crews had been operating out of temporary quarters on South Sherman Street during the construction.

The new Fire Station No. 2 has five bays, which can accommodate newer fire engines as well as an “alpha car,” which Snyder described last year as “basically an ambulance” that is usually used for minor calls but can provide regular ambulance service if American Medical Response units are unavailable.

That station replaces an old station four blocks away at 2300 Mountain View Ave., which had three bays for fire trucks, “only one of which was large enough for our current engines and none large enough for our ladder truck,” Snyder said,

The old station opened in 1967 and was dedicated to Vern Campbell, who had been hired in 1918 as Longmont’s first career fire chief. The Longmont Times-Call reported in 2019 that the building had been deemed “problematic” for several reasons, including that it couldn’t be expanded without taking over parts of its neighbors’ properties or street rights-of-way, that its driveways were on a blind curve of Mountain View, and that there was asbestos in the ceiling.

Sheahan said the city would keep that building for now and use it for office space for administration and training staff who now have offices at the public-safety and justice building at  225 Kimbark St. “Part of it will be a classroom for training,” she said.

Training was a big part of what went on in recent years at the site of the new station in northwest Longmont. Two vacant 1950s-era homes, at 2208 and 2212 17th Ave., were acquired by the city and had been used as training sites for firefighters, but those drills finally created so much damage that the houses outlived their usefulness. Once they were demolished, construction of the new Station No. 2 began in fall 2022.

Denver-based SEH Design Build designed both new stations and hired Thornton-based general contractor Taylor Kohrs to build them. 

The cost of building both stations, estimated in 2022 to be around $9 million, plus the cost of acquiring the two-acre site along 17th Avenue, was financed by a sale of municipal bonds that Longmont voters approved in 2018.