After more than a decade of planning and false starts, the Wallkill Fire District is prepared to bring a proposal to local taxpayers next spring for a new firehouse located on the Borden family property across the street from Wallkill Middle School. During a presentation on Thursday evening at the Shawangunk Town Board meeting, Wallkill Fire District Commissioners Michael Croce and Rich Freer laid out the organization’s proposed 17,500 square foot site that would necessitate $5,582,469 in borrowed funds to construct.

The tentative plan is to call a public vote on the proposed firehouse in March. The project contains $5,687,500 in building costs and $1,394,969 in additional soft costs, but $1,500,00 would be covered by reserve funds. The current firehouse plan represents the third design in the past 12 years, as the group has worked to lower the scope of the project. “We’ve done everything we could do to size back this firehouse,” Freer told the board. “Our main purpose is to serve the community with fire protection. You don’t need that big social hall, so we sized that down. But we do need a five-bay firehouse. The firehouse next door is a four-bay firehouse that was built in 1964 and that served us well. But in the future, we have developments planned in this town like the Wallkill Town Center, which is going to break ground next spring, and you never know when the Borden trust may start their project again.” The Shawangunk board does not have approval over the firehouse project, but the council previously voted to extend water and sewer service to the site of the proposed firehouse if it’s eventually built. “Because they’re not in the district, so we approved that we would extend it out of district just to their building, that’s all,” Shawangunk Supervisor John Valk said. “People think it’s up and down the road, but it’s just to their building.” The Shawangunk Planning Board handles the site plan review of the proposed project. During the presentation, Croce laid out the shortcomings of the department’s current facility, which is located behind the Shawangunk Town Hall, and has been largely unchanged from when it was built 54 years ago. “The truck bays are too small for today’s apparatus,” he said. “Over the years the fire apparatus has evolved to where we have all of our people inside the truck. Back in the day you’d go ahead and ride on the outside of the truck, but obviously that’s not very safe. So trucks have gotten a lot longer to go ahead and house all these individuals, which is important from a safety perspective. The personnel doesn’t really have the ability to walk around some of the trucks.” In a series of photos, Croce demonstrated how tight a squeeze the firefighters have between their lockers and the firetrucks, with no space to get around the vehicles. Besides the important space issues with the department’s fleet of trucks, the current firehouse has additional problems, including antiquated bathroom facilities and water damage on the ceilings. “The parking can be challenging, and most people don’t know this, but the fire department only had six parking spots,” Croce said. “We don’t really have any office space or rooms for meetings. In today’s day and age, in any volunteer organization, whether it’s ambulance or fire, it’s difficult to get members. One of the things that’s come up in a study is that a place to go gather is important for persons that join and we don’t really have a good spot to do that. We don’t have any record storage space, we’re renting that right now. We don’t have storage space for supplies for our bingo and other community functions.”

The single-pane windows in the building’s meeting room also date back to 1964 and are not energy efficient, and the roof also needs replacing. The new proposed two-story firehouse could also provide additional overflow parking for events at the middle school, as a crosswalk would have to be established across Route 208 to facilitate pedestrian travel between the two sites. The fire department purchased the property from the Donner family, and the building has been designed to fit within the historic ambience of the land. “The Donner family requested that it be kept with the character of the property, they couldn’t just put a flat roof on the building,” Valk said. “It’s a nice-looking building, and coming in or going out of town that’s what people see. It helps add to the character of the hamlet. But it’s a lot of money, so that’s up to the voters.

It’ll be a lot more money in a few years.” The department reps said that the proposed firehouse, which was designed by Cirillo Architects, has been streamlined for maximum efficiency and to keep costs down while prioritizing fire service. “It’s a much sized-down version from the original design,” Freer said. “The original design had six bays and a 150-seat social hall, but we’ve downsized that substantially to a five-bay firehouse. We’ve kept it in the same location on the site.” If the project is approved by voters and the fire department eventually moves out of their current headquarters in the hamlet, Shawangunk could purchase the site and convert it into a new police station if a deal could be struck. “It’s very early, but it’s been talked about,” Valk said. “If we could afford it we would be the prime owners to buy it because it’s right next to ours. We share the parking lot, and when the police arrest someone they could come right over to the court here. It would be the ideal thing if we could afford it. They (Croce and Freer) talked about all of the work it needs, so it would be a big nut to crack too.”