Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com:
The Naperville Fire Department and city staff are exploring the possible consolidation of some of the city’s 10 fire stations, Mayor Steve Chirico said Monday.
“Safety is the number one concern, of course, but we recognize Naperville has reached build out,” Chirico said. “So we need to ask the question if our stations are in the best locations, or if reconfiguring them could provide better service.”
Naperville Fire Chief Mark Puknaitis brought the consolidation idea up to the city manager City Manager Doug Krieger about a year ago, Krieger said Tuesday.
As Naperville has grown and changed over the years, the city has added fire stations, he said.
“If we were to do it all over again, the locations and number of stations might be different, so since we’ve kind of hit our build out, we thought that now would be a good time to look at coverage,” Krieger said. “Obviously, the most important component of coverage is response time. And another number of other factors come into play.”
Equalizing the workload across the city’s 10 fire stations also helps coverage, Krieger said.
Naperville’s current call to arrival time is six minutes 85.6 percent of the time. It’s unclear if potential station consolidation would affect response times.
“Currently we’re providing a very high service level,” Krieger said. “I would expect when things are all said and done, we’ll continue to supply a very high service level.”
“The goal is really to continue to provide a great service level and response time while minimizing cost. That’s really true to all departments in the city,” Krieger said.
The Naperville Fire Department employs 193 sworn, full-time, professional firefighters. Any reductions in staff to accompany consolidation would be done through attrition and natural retirements.
The staff has not come to any conclusions yet but there are plans on making a consolidation recommendation to the Naperville City Council this year.
Naperville Station 2 at 601 E. Bailey Road is the oldest station. Station 4 at 1971 Brookdale Road is also a training facility, and Station 7 at 1380 Aurora Ave. houses the department’s administrators.
