Council revives talks on new fire station

City officials will be headed back to the drawing board when it comes to getting a new fire station built in Shiner, council members agreed at their March 4th meeting.
“Basically, we are going back to some of the original plans drawn up over four years ago,” City Secretary Natalie Fric said. 
It has been a long and oft frustrating process for everyone involved, most especially the local fire department members who were already dealing with growing space concerns and upkeep issues that aging facilities like theirs always require, well before any of the rest would ever surface.
Yet with every plan that local fire department officials offered as potential solutions through the process has been met with all new rounds of obstacles, each one more costly than the one before it. 
With plans in place to build all new facilities, at a few different locations now, since this entire process began back in 2019, spending the department’s always limited funding to repair a place you’re getting ready to abandon at any moment didn’t seem like the wisest of financial decisions. Unfortunately, many of those repairs they needed five years ago are fast becoming urgent matters.
And they only get worse with each passing month.
 

The problem with plans…

Ask most in the fire department to identify the source of the woes when it comes to getting a new fire station and many will quickly point to the El Campo engineering outfit that they sourced to sign off on some of the more technical aspects of their building plans for a new station.
Their expertise was sought to address items like site specific elevations and how many loads of dirt it might take to get everything up to snuff in the build process. They are items a contractor will need to know to formulate an accurate bid for a job, as well as items the city and fire department can use to better assess those bids when they finally get to that point. 
Again. For the third time.
Because the first two times through, the bids got rejected because the costs moved from astronomical to just plain ridiculous. A big part of that, local fire department leaders say, has to do with the engineer adding items that never should have been part of the project to begin with.
The plans that were drawn up for the first round of bidding had several unnecessary items added after the department handed over its plans to the engineer. Items like air-conditioned bays, for instance, in a facility designed with big open doors on either side of the building so they can drive their truck straight on through, if they so choose.
Or, as another example, installing high dollar copper pipes for its city utility hookups at the station when far cheaper alternatives would serve them just as well.
All they did was drive up bid costs, fire department leaders maintain, after those same leaders were painstaking in their efforts to cut costs at every opportunity, even going line by line through supply lists to ensure they were using the most cost-effective options available.
After all that, the engineers tossed in all sorts of extras—high dollar automatic lighting systems for the bathrooms, for example, where a simple switch is all it really needed—and every bit added in the final hour, right before the job went out for bid.
All done, supposedly, to attract more bidders for the job, the city got told. 

They weren’t entirely wrong…

Most builders were flat covered up with work at the time, and the engineers knew full well that most were also well behind schedule on whatever jobs they already had in progress because of the many weeks of mandatory COVID shutdowns that occurred across the country.
So, if the city hoped to see its facility built sometime this decade, they needed to make it worth a contractor’s while, the firm reasoned.
They could always remove the extras later by means of change orders, the engineers maintained. Those are downright commonplace in the construction world these days. While the add-ons were still included in the job, however, they served their purpose in attracting a greater selection of bidders. Far more so than the barebones, stripped-down versions that the city kept turning out, anyway.
And they weren’t entirely wrong in their logic used to justify the last-minute changes to the bid paperwork. The city did indeed attract multiple bidders for the job, at least twice, in fact. A few even came from firms that Shiner doesn’t typically attract for projects like these.
Remember, too, contractors couldn’t have been much busier right about then either. There were major multibillion-dollar building projects going up everywhere you looked right then. 
To the east, pipelines were all re-aiming for the Port of Corpus Christi rather than the Houston ship channel lines that had been in existence since oil was first discovered here in Texas. And not just pipelines but all the necessary facilities that those lines require all along the way, while Corpus stayed busy with all sorts of projects of its own, from being the endpoint of all these news lines and coming up with storage for all the products that were headed its way. Or, setting up its ports to deal with a far larger brand of boat than that city was accustomed to.
Points south were blowing and going as billions in construction contracts got awarded daily to basically fortify our entire southern border, from Brownsville all the way to San Diego. Closer to home, major manufacturers like Tesla, SpaceX and the varied support industries that those places rely on were busy reshaping Austin and its sprawling suburbia. 
All while state agencies like the Texas Department of Transportation were announcing new and ambitious Texas highway construction plans and major infrastructure initiatives that focused on projects like rehabbing bridges and dams across the state. 
Talks were in place to build new VA hospitals for the growing number of aging veterans. Power plants to deal with an ever-increasing state population and longer hotter summers. Mental health and drug rehab facilities to deal with nation’s opioid crisis.  And there was scarcely a place in Texas that wasn’t still working on something Hurricane Harvey related. And every last bit of that involved what’s actually a fair stable number of actual construction workers. So, in that respect, Shiner probably needed a carrot or two to attract a few more bidders to the table.
 

But right? Not quite…

As one might suspect, dealing all those larger outfits with their impeccable resumes, bulletproof ratings and turnaround times that made your head spin, they were also used to dealing in dollar figures that were just as impressive and breathtaking as their credentials.
While all these change orders may be standard protocol for commercial construction outfits nowadays, it turns into a much a different issue for government entities like cities, who by simple procedural order, must first award a bid at whatever price it is before they can come back and initiate any changes.
By itself, even that wouldn’t be the end of the world, typically, under normal circumstances. 
But times were anything but “normal” in those first few months after COVID. A simple bag of concrete went from costing a few dollar bills at Lowe’s or Home Depot to costing, literally, tens and twenties, quite nearly overnight.  
Plus, if a job required use of metal in any way—mind you, their initial plan was to erect a structure not unlike a large metal barn; it was a place to park trucks and little more, so it was steel sheeting attached to steel beams—it may as well been plated in 24-karat gold for what it cost right about then.
So, how bad did it get, exactly? 
When Shiner Fire Chief Billy Petru first started planning this project based in the department’s needs in the late 20-teens, they had estimated costs, having visited with local builders to get a reasonable estimate. Petru figured it would likely ring in at about $80,000. The department even landed a grant to cover the bulk of those costs.
Bounce up to 2022 when they did their last bidding rounds, and the cheapest bid they received—after the city went out for its second round of bidders on the project, both of which had a few extras tossed in by the engineers at the final hour to “attract more bidders”—was close to $2.5 million. 
And that was the cheap end. For the equivalent of a barn, essentially.
With costs launching from less than $100,000 to 25 times that amount over the course of a year or two, city officials had little choice at the time but to put the brakes on construction plans entirely, especially with the other projects the city already had in progress at the time, all of which were costing the city substantially more than originally anticipated.

Drawing board is well used

Original plans for the project would have added another separate facility, directly across the street from the current fire station located at the corner of North Ave. D and Sixth Street on what was then city-owned property.
Then Public Works Director Mike Ulbig got asked at a council meeting to inspect the area and approve a variance the fire department had requested.
Rather than adhere to the usual setback requirements as listed in the city code—setbacks which exist so the city and fire department have alternative access points to your property, if needed, to fight a fire or deal with some other form of emergency—Petru hoped to cover every inch of the property with a building to park trucks.
Not only did Ulbig not grant the variance, he pointed out another flaw with the planned build site. Namely, power lines. And not just any lines either. They were power mains, the main trunk lines for the city, Ulbig said. Most standard building codes forbid construction of most any type, be it a building, a pool or even a hot tub installation directly beneath a power line.
It didn’t help in the least that it was to be a fully metal installation beneath all that juice, especially considering it would house close to half the city’s fleet of emergency vehicles. “If tornado or storm downed the line or something. . . It’s just not safe,” Ulbig told the newspaper then. 
That sparked a property search at several different locations around town, including points of the outskirts of town along both ends of Highway 90A. Another possible site would have placed a new station at the city’s edge along the Moulton highway. Another place discussed was over by the new water tower near the football stadium. After several weeks of several failed closed door negotiations, Petru eventually backed off the land purchase idea.
He then turned his attention to the city’s original fire station, where the police department is housed today. Petru started talking with local contractors to see what expanding the city’s old fire house might cost. 
The mere mention of that facility as a possibility instantly jacked up the price substantially.  
Council was rather insistent, it being a landmark historic building, that Petru maintain its attractive red brick exterior with any expansion he might undertake. 
Plus, it would have required taking out several large trees from the adjacent lot, which mere mention of it seemed to rile more than a few in the community. 
Ultimately the cost of the concrete alone worked to take refurbishing the old fire station building off the table. They would have had to put enough concrete down to qualify the place as a bomb shelter, at least four feet thick, across much of the adjoining lot, just to keep from scraping their bumpers off on the big fire trucks.
Which is how they found themselves looking at the city owned property next to the Wagner Medical Clinic, across the street from the library. 

Crisis averted, almost…

Just eyeing that property nearly set off a whole other controversy, for that location was once home to a small brick house that someone donated to the city after they passed away, a building that local senior citizens had turned into a gathering spot, to play dominos, enjoy weekly meals together and watch the occasional movie together.
To build a station there, that place would need to come down, a couple of councilmen noted after their Monday night meetings ended. 
A week later, they were gathered up in the old firehouse building, holding an emergency meeting about the pandemic that was attended by every senior citizen who frequented the place. Ignore the fact that they were permitted to meet them, per statewide pandemic rules the governor issued, nor would they be for some months still afterward.
As they lamented losing the place, talks soon turned to everything that was wrong with the old house and in need of repairs. 
That no one could use. For all our foreseeable futures, as best as anyone could guess at that moment. 
It was still quite early in the pandemic shutdown process. No one had a clue what might happen next.
Still, someone on the council ingeniously suggested they use the city’s facilities over in Green Dickson Park instead, and all was well again with the world. 
Sadly, taking down that old Senior Center Building is about as close as the fire department has gotten to a new station thus far.
“Anytime we wanted to take things out or add things, we had to pay more money for the changes,” City Secretary Fric said. So, we decided to go back to the drawing board with the original plans.”
“The current fire building is old, cramped, and the newer model fire trucks are too tall for it,” Fric said. “So, hopefully in April, we can officially go out for bids for the original fire station plans that were discussed years ago. The plan is to complete the construction done in multiple steps.”
And they try, try again. Hopefully with more fruitful results this go-round.
In other business:
• A quote from H&C Construction in the amount of $19,950 was made for the extension of 570-foot curbing on Hackberry Street.
• A quote totaling $43,535 was made for a new parking lot and awning behind the police station to house police, court, public works, and inspection vehicles.
• Additional batting cages at Field #5 in Green-Dickson Park was approved. The Little League will be providing the funding for this.