New West Side Fire Station Considered

The city may explore options to replace its west side fire station. Photo by Rachel Lukas.

A new west side fire station may be in the cards for the City of Sturgeon Bay. 

At Monday’s Committee of the Whole meeting involving the Common Council along with the city’s department heads and other staff, Fire Chief Tim Dietman requested a study be funded related to the size and adequacy of the West Side Fire Station at 656 S. Oxford Ave. Dietman said the station is getting to a point where it needs to be replaced.

“The station was built in [the 1970s] – we’re kind of bulging at the seams,” he said. “It wasn’t built for the trucks that we’re running. We have a lot of operational issues over there.”

Dietman said modifications have been made over the years, such as converting a large communal bedroom into a pair of bedrooms and turning a closet into a restroom.

He said the station, with its three single bays, is too small to perform maintenance inside on the trucks, which end up being worked on at the east side station next to City Hall.

Dietman said he also favors having a fire station on the west side in a better location, such as farther south in the city, because it is too close to the station on the east side to be able to better serve people in a five-mile radius from the stations.

“Although it’s not cheap to build a new station, it’s cheaper to build a new station than try to modify what we have, in the location that we’re in,” he said. 

Dietman said a new fire station on the west side was included in the city’s six-year capital improvement plan at an estimated cost a couple of years ago of $3 million, but the city may now face a higher price tag with increasing construction costs.