EDGERTON — The Lakeside Fire District is pivoting away from building a new fire station at the site of its current station at 621 N. Main St. in Edgerton.
Instead, the agency is in talks over a piece of land on the city’s west side on West Fulton Street.
West Fulton Street is a stretch of State Highway 59 — a busy corridor that runs between Edgerton and Evansville, and contains the towns of Fulton and Porter, a major portion of Lakeside’s fire district.
Fire Chief Randy Pickering didn’t specify the address under consideration.
It would be one of four new proposed stations for Lakeside Fire District. One is proposed at Newville at East Mallwood Drive and Highway 59. It’s considered the future district headquarters.
Another would be built on the same site as the current Milton fire station at 614 W. Madison Ave.
The fire district already has secured land for three of the four future stations.
The current Edgerton station is 34 years old. In recent years, Lakeside fire has moved away from the volunteer model. It has six crew members living in the Edgerton facility. As a result, the station is now too cramped for its needs, Pickering said. That’s alongside the property needing a number of city code upgrades plus some stormwater drainage problems.
Perhaps more significant, the current fire station had an environmental study show soil at the site is apparently contaminated with some sort of oil — a leftover from a previous user in the mid-20th Century.
Lakeside is focused in considering future sites, on maintaining five-minute response times for fire calls.
“There is actually overlap with the area covered by the Newville station and the current Edgerton station” Pickering said, adding that he and others realized that it would be a waste to keep the current station.
Moving the building to the west would actually improve response times for the towns of Porter and Fulton, which are west of Edgerton.
For the new station, Pickering said the fire district hopes to re-use designs it already has readied for a Milton fire station it intends to build in the Crossroads Business Park — a move that could lessen design costs.
The Milton East fire station whose design would be copied is planned as a 20,400 square-foot station with five garage bays.
The new proposed Edgerton site would be scaled back to 16,600 square feet, with three bays. It would include a workshop, a self-contained breathing apparatus room and dedicated decontamination areas, plus laundry storage and showers. It would also have living quarters with dormitories, a kitchen, dining area, a day room and bathrooms — plus a training and exercise space, and a quiet space and mother’s room.
Pickering said there has been interest in the current Edgerton station, though it is not currently for sale.
“The current contamination that exists is not progressive. It won’t get worse. As long as the current building sits there and we won’t try to expand, nothing has to be done with the contamination,” Pickering said.
The total price tag for building all the stations is roughly $50 million.
“When we go through the bidding process to maximize the discounts, the same kind of toilets, same kind of carpet, the same kind of tile, from an estimating standpoint that could be a 10, 15 or even 18% discount. We don’t know that until we put it out for bid,” Pickering said. “The revised design for the Edgerton station is going to bring those costs down. Obviously, the sale of the current Edgerton site is going to go into that, except for inflation. We are going to maximize everything to make sure it doesn’t cost us more in spite of the delays.”
As this is all going on, the district is trying to secure a U.S. Department of Agriculture rural development loan and is receiving legal guidance on statutory requirements with that, which has slowed the project down, Pickering said.
