Kingfisher city commissioners are expected to approve a proposal at their March meeting calling for a 10-year designated sales tax primarily to fund the construction of a new fire station.

The proposed tax will be submitted to city voters in May and city staff hope it will be approved after residents narrowly voted down a broader permanent sales tax intended for capital improvements, including the fire station.

At a special meeting at the end of January billed as a “sales tax proposal workshop,” commissioners, city staff, Fire Chief Tony Stewart and other members of his department discussed possible locations for a new station, which would replace the 45-year-old building on South Main Street.

Stewart first pointed out the advantages of demolishing the existing building and constructing a new station at the current location.

(Stewart and City Manager Dave Slezickey met with an engineer some time ago who advised against expanding and improving the existing building.)

“I think some things we see as a benefit to remaining where we are is being on Main Street and having easy access to Main Street,” Stewart said. “I don’t want to go too far south because we would be fighting more traffic getting back to town.”

Stewart said that other than the safety of his men and the town’s citizens, his biggest concern is protecting the vulnerable buildings of downtown.

“Downtown there is nothing that is sprinkled and you guys know that we got very, very fortunate when the 89er Theater burned down that we kept the fire right there and it didn’t spread further.

“A fire doubles itself every 35 seconds, so being a little closer to the downtown and the older residential neighborhoods where homes are mostly wood, that’s a plus to staying where we are.”

“Downtown as far as fires are concerned is what I really worry about because if we have another fire there we may not be as lucky in keeping it contained,” he added.

Stewart also highlighted some of the problems with the existing building identified in an engineering inspection.

“The plumbing in the equipment bay is almost solid pipe, it’s gotten so corroded,” he said.

Stewart said the existing building also is not structurally sound enough to support an expansion.

“The way the roof was built and the way the station was added on to in bits and pieces in the past, when the architects who looked at it came back they said we would be wasting our time and money trying to expand on the current building,” he said.

“If we stay at that location, the existing building is coming down,” Slezickey said.

The condition of the existing building also precludes the possibility of keeping it and building a new building elsewhere, operating one of them as a substation.

“We can’t build a new building and leave the current one as is,” Slezickey said. “So if we go the substation route, we’d be looking at building two buildings.”

His suggestion was to design and build a new station that would be large enough to accommodate growth in the fire department through “2040 or 2050” and then look at building a substation.

“Right now we’re at six-man shifts and I would suggest we build something that would accommodate eight-man shifts,” Slezickey said. “Then if and when we reach a point we grow beyond that size, we could look at building a substation.”

Another problem with the current location is, although the city owns the lot to the east of the existing fire station, the alley between the two contains utilities that could not all be relocated.

Options discussed included building two separate buildings on each side of the alley and connecting them with a walkway or constructing a tunnel underneath the alley to allow access to the utilities and building the equipment bay on top.

“That way we could have one continuous building,” Stewart said.

“There would have to be a very significant reason from a location standpoint to do something like that verses going somewhere else,” Commissioner Kyle Mecklenburg said.

“If you tell me this is absolutely the perfect location, then let’s figure out how to do it. But if there’s not a significant reason and there’s another place we can build and not have to do all that, that makes more sense.”

Commissioners and city staff discussed several other potential locations, although no discussions would begin with current landowners until after the election in May.

“What I’m hearing from this discussion is that we want one centralized building and we want it on Main Street,” Slezickey said. “If that’s where we’re comfortable at, then we can narrow it down as we move forward.”

“Main Street is our preference, but it’s not a deal breaker,” Mecklenburg said. “If it has access to a major road, that could work.”

Stewart said if the building is located on Main Street, he prefers the east side of the street rather than the west, “because it makes it easier to get downtown.”

The March city meeting, which will include February’s agenda postponed due to weather, is in the process of being rescheduled, due to a conflict with the Chamber of Commerce Banquet.