St. Joseph City Council Approves Studies For Analyzing Public Safety Upgrades

(KNSI) – The city of St. Joseph is proceeding with two studies to examine the construction of a new police station, the expansion of its current fire hall and building a new refueling station.

The city council voted at yesterday’s meeting to approve a public safety master planning and programming study that would examine how big a police station would need to be built and how much space is necessary for expanding the fire hall. The study would also assess the amount of space required to proceed with the construction of its planned refueling station.

The second study is an assessment aimed at reevaluating the fire hall’s current infrastructure and determining whether the building could support the construction of certain areas, such as decontamination areas and additional truck bays.

The city’s current police station is shared as a joint facility with City Hall. According to Police Chief Dwight Pfannenstein, the station’s current location has been hampered by numerous safety concerns and space limitations, including insufficient room for several areas of the department and malfunctioning garage doors.

Pfannenstein further noted that several areas in City Hall have resorted to subdividing certain rooms into smaller cubicles for officers due to a lack of space. Building a brand-new police station, he said, would help address these problems without a steep price tag.

“If you remove the police department from this equation, City Hall can expand on our site. Some of our areas, like locker rooms, can be used by staff. One of the biggest failures of this building was the lack of storage rooms; if we put them into a new building, there would be very little remodel cost to taxpayers on this building.”

Pfannenstein also noted that the city’s fire hall, originally constructed in the 1990s, needs updates, including more room to store extra trucks and additional office space. He added that while the hall’s primary infrastructure is concrete, several areas with steel framing have been steadily rusting over the years and need to be brought up to code. Adding decontamination bays, he said, would also protect firefighters’ health by reducing exposure to harmful chemicals on the job.

The city is considering constructing its new refueling station on the site of a former Casey’s General Store it purchased last year. The site contains two 10,000-gallon underground tanks that were tested and certified at the time of purchase. Pfannenstein said the tanks could be used to store and dispense two types of fuel: gasoline for squad cars and diesel for fire trucks and public works vehicles. He added that the city hopes to construct the new police station, fire hall and refueling station together as a single campus on the site.

The city will partner with BKV Group, an architectural design firm, on the public safety study. For the fire hall assessment, BKV would partner with Kraus-Anderson, a Minneapolis-based real estate and construction firm. The studies themselves will cost a combined $22,950.

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