The Rock Township Ambulance District and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office will join forces to build a combined ambulance station and satellite Sheriff’s substation in the Seckman Valley.
Plans call for the facility to be built on a 6.4-acre parcel of land the ambulance district bought on Lions Den Road, which is west of Old Lemay Ferry Road in Imperial, Rock Ambulance Chief Jerry Appleton said.
He said the property was purchased in August from the Dierks family for $260,000.
“This site is smack dab in the middle of our district,” Appleton said. “Our other four houses are kind of around the outside, but this one will be right in the middle.”
The Jefferson County Council voted 6-0 last week to approve an agreement allowing the Sheriff’s Office to share the cost of designing and building the facility. Councilwoman Vicky James (District 7, Cedar Hill) was absent from the meeting.
A fifth ambulance house has long been part of Rock Township’s long-range master plan. While the district doesn’t yet have a cost estimate for the new facility, it will be funded with revenue from the $23 million bond issue voters approved in late 2018, Appleton said.
The Sheriff’s Office has been looking to relocate its East Zone substation currently housed on the Windsor schools campus in Imperial.
“We’ve had a great partnership with Windsor for more than 20 years,” Sheriff Dave Marshak said. “But we’ve outgrown the space. We were looking at it last year, talking about alternatives, and that’s about the time Chief Appleton approached me with this idea.”
Marshak said the proposed facility would meet many of his department’s needs.
“It will provide us space for equipment that right now is spread out in many different places,” he said. “And we are thinking of putting some special operations assets there. It should enhance safety and security in that area.”
Appleton said the ambulance district currently has five ambulance crews, including a relief crew. The proposed building would house a new sixth ambulance crew, partly funded through the 1/4-cent sales tax increase passed in November.
“The new crew will be based out of the new place,” Appleton said. “(The building) will house two crews and a shift supervisor, and will have four bays – two for us and two for the Sheriff’s Office. There’ll be some shared spaces, like meeting rooms and a fitness area and storage. Then the Sheriff’s Office will have their offices or whatever they need on the other side.”
The agreement stipulates that both entities will evenly split the design fees and site development costs, and then will each pay its own portion of the building costs.
“The shared spaces costs will be divided 50/50,” Appleton said. “The rest will be calculated based on square footage. If we end up having 60 percent of the square feet, we’ll pay 60 percent of the remaining cost.”
Appleton said there still are some details to be worked out.
“With the meeting room and other shared spaces, there will have to be a common schedule that both sides keep up with,” he said. “We plan to have the utilities separate, and we’re working on things like having one electrical service line coming into the building and then split it into two panels that can be metered separately.
“But this will definitely save money because we’re not duplicating costs.”
Appleton said ambulance crews would staff the building 24/7, and the Sheriff’s Office side likely would be staffed from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., like the other current substations.
Appleton said the project should come together fairly quickly over the coming weeks.
“We’ve been talking about this for about a year,” he said. “Now we can get down to the nitty gritty and not just scratching out ideas on paper.
“It’s still early in the planning stages, but we should have a rendering in a couple of weeks. With board approval, we could be sending out (requests for construction) bids by February or March.”
With construction costs as high as they are, Appleton said the district will have to exercise caution.
“Well, of course, the hope is that prices will go down at least some by the time we’re ready to start,” he said. “But if the bids come back too high, we may have to rethink or maybe wait.”
Once the building is complete, the county will enter into a lease agreement with Rock Ambulance for the Sheriff’s Office portion of the facility.
“We have never actually built a substation,” Marshak said. “We have developed partnerships to have free space – on the Windsor campus, at Jefferson College. We have known this was coming, and we’ve been saving our money for a long time.
“We will probably do a 20- or 30-year lease, paying up front, and then we could negotiate any separation if and when the need arises. But I think this will be a long-term partnership.”
The design fees and site development costs paid by the Sheriff’s Office will be applied toward future lease payments, Appleton said.
Improvements and even a possible relocation of the Rock Township’s House 3, 1500 Prehistoric Hill Drive, in Imperial, also are part of the master plan. Completed in 1995, the facility has had no significant improvements or upgrades and is showing its age, Appleton said.
“That building is in need of major updates,” he said. “So we’re either going to do major renovations or we might be looking at relocating. It will depend on what a call volume study shows, and that probably won’t be until 2024.
“We’re not going to invest a bunch of money in a project that isn’t where we need it to be. It’s all about what is the best choice for the community.”
The district already relocated two of its stations. The district’s original House 1, built in 1992 across Hwy. 141 from the Arnold Recreation Center complex, was relocated to a 2.1-acre property just off Jeffco Boulevard and opened in July 2021.
House 2, built in 1986 on Hwy. 21 in the Shady Valley area, was relocated to a 13.8-acre tract in Fenton and opened in October 2021.
“We keep working at this master plan,” Appleton said. “We keep doing the best we can to use the district resources effectively.”