City closes in on location for new fire station
The Hot Springs Fire Department has identified two potential locations for the station it’s been wanting to build in south Hot Springs since 1989.
Fire Chief Ed Davis recommended the parcel behind the First Security Bank branch in the 4000 block of Central Avenue. First Security Way traverses the 3-acre parcel. Davis said only about a third of the acreage is buildable land.
“That’s more than enough to build a fire station on,” he told the Hot Springs Board of Directors at its Feb. 28 work session.
The bank owns the property and is willing to sell it to the city for $319,000, Davis said. The real estate appraisal service the Garland County assessor contracts valued it at $919,800.
“We’ve looked at a lot of sites,” City Manager Bill Burrough told the board. “There’s not a lot of sites to be had. One of the concerns we had is how long it would last before it disappears.”
The committee Burrough formed last year to prioritize more than $40 million in unfunded capital needs ranked a fire station south of the King Expressway as the second most urgent item. An armored vehicle for the SWAT team was the only item the committee ranked higher.
Davis estimated a 2,700-squarefoot station with two apparatus bays could be built for $2.66 million, land costs included. The Lakeshore Drive fire station is the southernmost of the city’s five fire stations. Davis said the Lakeshore crew would move to the new station, and a rescue company would be established at Lakeshore.
“We need a rescue company,” he told the board. “It’s really important we have people who are highly trained in
technical rescue that do that for a living. They can be the leads on an emergency, like a building collapse. It would take people currently scattered all over the department and place those people on that piece of equipment.”
Forced annexations that took effect in 2016 and 2018 expanded the city south, making the need for a station on the south side of the city more urgent.
“On the lake, we’re having a proliferation of building,” Davis said. “There’s a lot structures there, a lot of multi-stories.”
Davis said it would give the city an Insurance Service Office rating of one, the top mark on the one-to-10 scale that informs real estate insurance rates. Property owners in areas with high marks pay lower rates.
Davis said large commercial and residential properties would benefit from the top ISO classification, but single-family homes were unlikely to see any savings. He said homeowners stopped receiving additional premium credits when the fire department reached an ISO classification of three.
Davis said a vacant parcel Allen Tillery owns behind his car lot at 4579 Central Ave. is also available for $725,000. It’s valued at $483,750 on the tax rolls.
“It would work well and give us good access,” Davis told the board. “It would really serve well as an anchor for that part of the city.”
Radio project
Davis said some of the stubborn coverage gaps in the city’s radio system could be closed for $850,000. That would pay to put a repeater on the West Mountain tower the city and county own and reconfigure the system’s microwave network.
The police department moving its radio traffic last year from the analog trunked system it had used for more than a quarter-century to a digital platform completed the city’s migration to the Arkansas Wireless Information Network, or AWIN.
But the city said the move to the state-run, 700-800 MHZ frequency digital microwave-based interoperable communications system used by more than 900 federal, state and local agencies hasn’t closed coverage gaps downtown and elsewhere.
The microwave dish Motorola was installing in the tower of the Army and Navy General Hospital in 2019 promised to close the downtown gap, affording a strategic perch to propagate radio signals into and out of the hard-to-reach area of upper Central and lower Park avenues.
But the state abandoned the building, announcing in May 2019 the end of the residential vocational and job placement program for young adults with disabilities the building had housed since 1960. The surprise announcement led to the city removing the repeater from the tower.
“ACTI was the linchpin in the entire configuration of the system,” Davis, referring to the Arkansas Career Training Institute, the name of the program the building housed, told the board. “It was the sweet spot that reached into many places on Malvern Avenue, reached into Lakeside School, reached into downtown Hot Springs. We did an incredible amount of research to pinpoint the best spot, and that was ACTI.”
Motorola told the city last year that moving the repeater to West Mountain would void coverage guarantees for the 100 to 700 block of Central Avenue, National Park College, the Hot Springs Convention Center, Bank OZK Arena, Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa and Lakeside and Langston elementary schools.
“It will increase coverage outside of buildings by quite a bit,” Davis said of West Mountain. “It won’t solve all the problems of the basements on Central Avenue that ACTI would’ve penetrated. ACTI is no longer on the table. There’s nothing like ACTI coming. This is the next best thing.”
The ranking committee listed the West Mountain project as the fourth highest priority. It’s unclear why the repeater is on the list of unfunded capital needs, given that the city said $1.5 million remains from the more than $6 million set aside for the radio project.
The 2.6 mill property tax the city levied during the 2016 and 2017 tax years provided $3.54 million for the project, with enterprise accounts such as the city’s water, wastewater and solid waste funds paying the balance.