Crime & Safety
Fire District Continues to Mull Options for New Setauket Fire House
Community Building Committee continues to narrow down choices for a potential fire house redesign.
A group of Setauket fire commissioners and community leaders convened last Monday to continue to narrow down site plan ideas for a new Station 1 fire house on Main Street in Setauket.
The Community Building Committee has been meeting since the spring of 2011 to determine whether a major renovation of the existing fire house or a completely new fire house would be more feasible. The current Station 1 fire house is badly in need of repair and redesign, fire commissioners have said.
After Setauket's board of fire commissioners narrowed down five options to three at a meeting in June, the Community Building Committee, with input from the Civic Association of the Setaukets and Stony Brook and the Three Village Community Trust, seemed to prefer a hybrid of two of the designs [see "Option 2" and "Option 3" above]. The biggest difference between the current fire house and those two options would place the entrance and exit for the actual trucks and other first responder vehicles onto Old Town Road rather than onto Main Street. Reconfiguration of the traffic light or traffic patterns at Old Town Road and Main Street would likely be required.
In the images above, the red areas indicate apparatus bays where the trucks and other vehicles would be parked; the yellow areas indicate where administrative offices and other fire service rooms would be located; and the blue areas represent training rooms and public spaces available for the community's use as well as the fire department's use.
Bob DeZafra, representing the civic association, said planning should take into account flexibility to add or modify the fire house in the future based upon what kind of needs develop over the next few decades.
"Fifty years from now, who knows what the community is going to be like or what kind of equipment is going to be needed?" DeZafra said. "... Don’t lock yourself into present needs and forget about future needs."
Along those lines, resident John Cunniffe, an architect who has done pro bono work for the fire district along the way, said it's important to find a result that can be a model for the way future development arises on Route 25A.
"If it does get built, I want it to be something that sets a precedent," he said.
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Cunniffe also suggested that the corner of Main Street and Old Town Road, at the very corner of the fire department property, could be enhanced with green space, an idea that appealed to others present at the meeting.
Longtime resident Robert Reuter said he is concerned with the idea that some parts of the existing fire house remain intact to provide a sense of continuity for the community."I just think that there’s value in that," he said, adding that it would convey "a subtle message about economy and preservation that might speak to the public at large."
While the discussions up until now have focused on the layout of the fire house based on the needs of the fire department and the community, Reuter said another challenge will be the actual appearance of the resulting structure.
"I think a good contemporary building that expresses the age in which it’s built but respects the context in which it’s inserted is the problem," he said.
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"The board realizes that the piece of real estate that 190 Main Street represents is an important centerpiece to the downtown Setauket area, and we have a responsibility to make it fit what the community as a whole is looking for as far a building and site design are concerned," he said. "To that end, we feel that H2M did an excellent job representing the Community Committee's desires."
He acknowledged that the process is taking "a while," saying it's very important that everyone is on the same page and that the fire district is trying to be as transparent as possible.
"It can't be overstated how important it is to have a transparent process that involves as much input from the fire department and community as possible," he said. "We want everyone to be involved with every step so that this can be a 100 percent group effort to come up with a design of a building everyone can feel good about."
No figures have been formally discussed regarding how much either of the projects might cost, but Tanzi said the three site plans presented on Monday were within $1 million of each other – "effectively equal," he said – based on what he called "a thumbnail analysis."
The next step in the process will lie in the hands of the board of fire commissioners, who will meet to discuss the feedback given by the community leaders. Its meetings – both the regular meetings and the building committee meetings – are open to the entire community; the next building committee meeting date is still to be determined.
A usability study completed in November of 2011 by Huntington Station-based architect Frank G. Relf found that the Main Street fire house is not up to code in several areas and needs improvement in other areas to address safety, health and handicap accessibility.
Specifically, the study cited "inadequate clearances around the vehicles and between the gear racks and trucks in the apparatus bays which does not comply" with Occupational Safety and Health Administration and National Fire Protection Association regulations.
Check out past coverage of this topic on Three Village Patch:
- Setauket Fire District Hires Architect to Draw Up Building Plans
- Carving a Path for the Future of the Fire House
- Residents Show Support for Renovating Main Street Fire House
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