Borough fire station plans draw disagreement

BIG LAKE — Bill Gamble says everyone is on board with borough plans to consolidate ambulance service in the Houston and West Lakes fire service areas.

Well, almost everyone. Houston Mayor Roger Purcell doesn’t seem to like the idea.

“He showed up (at a meeting) last night and tried to get into the middle of the conversation,” Gamble said. “I politely asked him to leave.”

Purcell said his beef isn’t so much with the consolidation of ambulance services. His only problem there is minor — the consolidation might create an ambulance service lacking a specifically Houston identity.

What really bugs him, Purcell said, is where two of the ambulances are going to go.

Gamble said two ambulances would be housed in a building near Parks Highway and Johnson Road that West Lakes is going to purchase and convert into a fire station.

He said the new location is perfect, offering fast response times onto the Parks Highway and situated almost directly in between two West Lakes fire stations.

But West Lakes isn’t the only fire department eyeing the area for a new fire station.

And this is where the controversy comes in. Houston has for years been laying groundwork for a station on Kenlar Road off of Big Lake Road, just a mile from the borough’s proposed site, Purcell said.

He said he thinks the city and the borough should team up and build one building instead of two.

“It’s a waste of a half a million dollars of borough money just so they can be first,” Purcell said.

And he sees trouble down the road if the borough and Houston both end up seeking state money for their projects. They will be in direct competition for those funds, Purcell said.

Dennis Brodigan, director of Emergency Services for the borough, said there is a very good reason not to put those ambulances and fire trucks in the Houston station. That mile between Houston’s site and the borough’s site is crucial.

“The fire station they plan to build is only 2.8 miles from our current fire station 8-1,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to build stations too close to one another.”

But it also doesn’t make sense to situate them too far apart, Brodigan said. Moving the apparatus closer to station 8-1 would in turn move them farther from station 7-1, widening the distance responders have to travel, he said. Building at Parks and Johnson, on the other hand, puts them nearly equidistant and augments the current services just right. Just like Houston, the borough has been working on this plan for years.

Brodigan said he has talked to Purcell about moving into Houston’s building. At the time, he said, he agreed with Purcell, that it doesn’t make sense to build both stations. But, in the meantime, the borough has looked at the maps and found that the Houston plan wouldn’t work for the borough.

“I realize that it does conflict with what the city of Houston is proposing, but I guess what I would say is that the door is still open for us to sit down and talk about what makes the most sense,” Brodigan said.

Purcell said he knows what makes most sense and it’s to build a large station on Kenlar. He said his plans include a helipad and a fire-training center and typified the borough plan as solving the problem in a “piecemeal” fashion.

He said what’s best for the area “is a new facility that meets all the needs of the area for future growth.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.