Struthers officials consider raising taxes to build new fire station

By Jeanne Starmack

The 67-year-old main station has structural problems.

STRUTHERS — Deteriorating conditions at the city’s main fire station have prompted administrators to consider building a new one, but paying for it might mean asking for more taxes.

Economic times are tough, say the city’s fire chief and mayor. But the Elm Street station’s floor can’t support the weight of the two engines it was keeping there.

One of them is now in storage in a building in the CASTLO Industrial Park, said fire Chief Harold Milligan Jr. The city’s third engine, he said, is at the second station on Frank Avenue across the Mahoning River.

Milligan said a spring under the Elm Street building is contributing to the problems with the floor.

When the station was being built in 1943, he explained, the discovery of the spring prompted the builders to back off building an entire basement. They built half a basement and backfilled the other half, he said.

The backfill has settled and shifted over the decades, causing a wall that separates the filled area from the rest of the basement to develop cracks. The city discovered air space under the floor two years ago and cut the floor out, pouring in thicker concrete, Milligan said.

But the spring “pops up all over the place” in the basement, he added. The city has tried to deal with it with drainage pipes and a sump pump, but now, water is seeping out of the cracks in the wall, he said.

The weight of the trucks is too much stress on the wall. In 1943, a truck weighed 15,000 pounds. Now, the trucks weigh about 40,000 pounds, he said.

An engineer recommended parking one of the trucks outside, but the department can’t do that in the winter, he said. The cold might damage the pumps.

That left the option of storing the truck at CASTLO, Milligan said.

Milligan said the engineer could temporarily fix the wall with concrete supports for about $100,000. A new station, which will be needed eventually anyway, will cost between $2.5 million and $3 million, he said.

A possible location is property on Garfield Street across from the football stadium, he said. That property is owned by the school district. It might also be possible, he said, to demolish the old building and use the station’s present location.

The city was passed over for federal stimulus money for the project, he said.

Federal grants could be available, he added, and the city will explore that option. There’s no other city money available, he added, especially since the bad economy has cut into income tax revenues.

“We’re trying to move forward without reducing the level of services,” said Mayor Terry Stocker, so there’s no way a new fire station will be in the city’s final budget in March.

Auditor Tina Morell said the two most realistic options are asking for a property tax levy or raising the city’s income-tax rate.

Stocker said administrators are considering asking for a property tax that would be earmarked for both fire and police.

He said that the police department’s spending is tight. The department wasn’t going to replace a cruiser this year, but got one through a grant, he said.

“But we are running out of these options.”

Morell said that before the city could figure out how many mills to ask for on a levy, it would need to know for sure how much it will be spending on the station. The city would borrow money, paying it back over a 20-year period, and the millage would have to generate enough revenue to make the bond payments plus interest and other expenses associated with them.

starmack@vindy.com