Hazelwood fire station site nixed

Apr. 2--Waynesville leaders have pulled out of a $430,000 contract to buy 3.5 acres in Hazelwood for a new fire station after discovering the tract would need costly site work that exceeded the town's budget.

"The board voted to terminate the contract after completing its due diligence," Waynesville Town Manager Rob Hites said.

The new fire station would have replaced the existing one in Hazelwood, which has outgrown its current location amid increased call volume on that side of town.

The 3.5-acre site the town hoped to buy is known locally as the old tannery site. It lies just over the railroad tracks from downtown Hazelwood, bordering the Giles Chemical Warehouse and across the street from the urgent care center.

The town took out a property option on the tract in February pending soil testing and a geotechnical study. The results revealed the top 3 to 7 feet of soil is old fill material that can't be compacted and has construction debris buried in it -- including concrete, wood and metal pipes.

"The site in its current condition is not well-suited for development and loading," states the report by Bunnell-Lammons Engineering.

It could be fixed by excavating and replacing the top 5 or so feet of soil. The cost of preparing the site would be around $140,000, however.

The property owner was apparently unwilling to lower the price to offset the cost of site work. The town board met in closed session last week to discuss what to do and decided to back out.

"The price of the property was at the very upper limit of what the town could afford. So we would have to have a site delivered to us shovel-ready at the price we had offered," Hites said.

According to county property deeds, the 3.5 acre tract was purchased for $293,000 in 2006 by Glenn Tolar, a local real estate investor who also bought a couple of other large vacant tracts around the same general time period.

The site had been lauded as an ideal location for a fire station, due to its convenient access to the four-lane bypass.

"We felt like this was the best spot, but due to the situation we have to drop back and reevaluate and see what else we can figure out," Waynesville Fire Chief Joey Webb said. "I guess we are kind of back to square one."

Finding alternative sites won't be easy given limited availability of vacant land in the Hazelwood area, coupled with much of Hazelwood lying in the flood plain.

Further complicating matters, the fire station needs to be within a five-mile radius of the property in its service territory to ensure homeowners get the best possible fire insurance rating, which is determined in part on response times.

"There's just a little bit of room you have to play with there," Webb said. "You have to find the happy medium. You can't shift too far in either direction."

The existing Hazelwood fire station dates back to the days of an all-volunteer force and isn't adequate for housing paid firefighters pulling 24-hour shifts nor parking today's fire vehicles.

Building a new fire station would cost an estimated $4.5 million.The town board will also have to consider whether this expense is still doable given the financial toll the coronavirus crisis will likely have on local government budgets.

___

(c)2020 The Mountaineer (Waynesville, N.C.)

Visit The Mountaineer (Waynesville, N.C.) at themountaineer.villagesoup.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.