The Cortez Fire Protection District received an update on the construction of its new station at during the board’s monthly meeting on Wednesday night.
According to Kyle Blackman, who is in charge of the project, the crew has begun masonry work and will work Fridays and Saturdays as weather permits.
“We are at the point in the calendar year when we are going to use every good weather day possible,” Blackman said. “We are still tracking on schedule, but I don’t want to lose all that time. We should start to see structural steal mid-December.”
Assistant Fire Chief Shawn Bittle told the board about the Hazmat Drill held at Cortez Middle School on Wednesday afternoon.
“I went over last week and taught the teachers how to seal their doors off in case of a hazmat spill,” Bittle said. “So they can shelter in place and keep the kids safe while we try to mediate the situation.”
Bittle also reported that the annual “Tip a Firefighter” event at J Fargo’s went well and the department raised $1,624.
Fire Chief Jeff Vandevoorde reported that the district is 166 calls over last year.
“In October we ran 1,166 calls,” Vandevoorde said. “We had 135 EMS and eight vehicle accidents, so that brings our total (for 2017) to 17,063 calls.”
The board approved an additional notice of public hearing for the 2017 budget because of changes since construction of the new station began.
The amendment isn’t a big deal; it just have to do with our lease purchase. When we wrote the 2017 budget, we did not include the lease purchase in the 2017 budget because at the end of 2016, we were still working on it,” Administrator Wendy Mimiaga said. “Since the lease purchase did go through last March, and we have received that in our escrow account for the construction of the new fire station, I need to amend the budget now to include that money that we took in even though we are not spending it this year.”
The board approved the amendment unanimously.