Marlborough creates second panel to find a place to put new west side fire station

MARLBOROUGH — Mayor J. Christian Dumais is looking to make good on a key campaign promise: creating a fire station on the city's west side.

Dumais recently signed an executive order to create a second West Side Fire Station Commission. The panel will be tasked with finding a spot for a new fire station in Marlborough's west side .

The first commission was established by former Mayor Arthur Vigeant in 2018, which eventually filed a 171-page report with the city a year later. That commission identified one particular location, 100 Locke Drive, as being desirable for a new fire station. However, the city was unable to purchase the property — the landowner demanded more than the $5.09 million that the city was willing to offer.

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Dumais, who pledged during his campaign last year and during his inauguration speech on New Year's Day that he would get the project completed, created a new commission to find a new location. After serving on the first commission as a city councilor, he said the sole purpose of the new commission is to find a suitable location.

“We did all the legwork during the previous commission — the design, the scope, all of that stuff — so this commission is all about finding a location that is 3 to 5 acres of land," the mayor said. "Then we can figure out how big the station will be. But we can’t do that until we have the actual property."

West side has experienced delayed response times

Dumais said the issue of building a fire station on the city's west side dates back to the construction of the Solomon Pond Mall in 1996, which kickstarted development in a part of the city that had previously been relatively rural. Since then, even more development has occurred.

Marlborough has three fire stations — on Pleasant Street, Maple Street and on Boston Post Road. The Pleasant Street station is the furthest west, which has led to it handling a disproportionate number of calls.

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According to data gathered by the first commission, the Pleasant Street fire station handled 45% of all of Marlborough's emergency calls in 2018, while the Maple Street station handled 26% and the Boston Post Road station handled 28%. Fire Chief Kevin Breen , who chairs the new commission, said the ratio of calls since then has become even more lopsided.

"I think it would surprise a lot of people that over half of our calls are coming from what would be considered the west side of Marlborough," he said.

Response should be under four minutes and 'we just aren't doing it'

Breen said the standard expectation for emergency response times is that 90% of all calls should be responded to in under four minutes, a number the department is struggling to hit given the distance between the Pleasant Street station and much of the city's west side.

"Your first arriving unit should be there within four minutes of 90% of all your calls, and we just aren't doing it," Breen said. "We can't get there without a fire station on the west side."

An additional issue is that the Pleasant Street station is more than 100 years old, and limited in size and its ability to function as a modern fire station.

"We just purchased a fire truck, and we had to make sure that it would fit in the Pleasant Street station, and I can honestly say that really limited what options we had for a new truck," Breen said. "People laugh when I say this, but the Pleasant Street station was originally designed with bays for horse-drawn firefighting equipment. It's outlived its usefulness."

City has $5 million ready to be spent on new location

The city has more than $5 million in a fund ready to be spent on a new location. As west side development has increased, particularly along the Interstate 495 corridor, projects that have been granted permits by the city have added money to the fire station fund.

“We have a little over $5 million in land acquisition to purchase a location if need be, or we can repurpose the money to actually build the fire station,” City Council President Mike Ossing said. “As part of the Green District , there were two payments of about $1.4 million each as part of the special permit conditions. There is a 55-plus complex coming up off of Crowley Drive, when they pulled their occupancy permit, that was another $1 million going to the station, so we have the $5 million to purchase the land, and now over $4 million in seed money to build the station.”

Whether a new station on the west side replaces the Pleasant Street station would be determined by what location ultimately becomes available, according to Breen.

"It's all about the location," he said. "If we find a space that's big enough, that could replace the Pleasant Street station. But that's going to be difficult — any property that is available that's larger than five acres is going to cost an exorbitant amount of money."

Ward 4 City Councilor Teona Brown, who is also on the commission, said she lives in an area on the west side that's affected by the longer emergency response times.

"Absolutely, among my constituents this feels like a topic that has been talked about for years but has never been completed," Brown said. "It's been something I've been very concerned about — even before I was a councilor — and I do feel the current administration has made it a top priority."

This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Marlborough creates second panel to find a place to put new west side fire station