Farmington's three volunteer fire stations have received little more than basic maintenance since the early 2000s. On May 12, the Town Council voted unanimously to do something much larger about it — advancing a plan to replace two of the stations and renovate the third at an estimated $30 million to $35 million, and seating a new committee to carry the work toward a referendum.

The council did it in three votes. It approved the Ad Hoc Fire Station Committee's statement of needs and recommended project scope, disbanded the ad hoc committee that produced them, and seated a new Fire Station Building Committee. None of the three drew a dissent on the dais. The only sustained pushback came from the public comment podium, where one resident told the council the price had climbed from an initial $9 million to get where it is.

The recommendation, presented by Town Manager Kathleen Blonski, lays out three projects and their estimated costs: a new East Farms fire station on its current site at $9 million; a renovated and expanded Farmington fire station at $12.1 million; and a new Tunxis Hose fire station, also on its current site, at $10 million. The committee put the combined budget range at $30 million to $35 million — figures that, Blonski said, do not yet account for cost escalation. The committee also recommended aggressively pursuing grants to bring down the net cost to the town.

The fire stations were not the only major question on the council's plate that night: the same meeting revived a long-dormant proposal to put a cemetery on part of Don Tinty Family Park.

What the committee found

The Ad Hoc Fire Station Committee was established by the council in January 2025 and spent 16 months on the question. Its members included two council liaisons — Dave Wlodkowski, a First District Democrat, and Nadine C. Canto, a First District Republican — along with town staff, public safety leadership, and the chiefs of Farmington's three volunteer fire departments. They toured the existing stations, read facility studies dating back to 2014, met with each fire chief, reviewed the town's long-term financial forecast, and visited the new fire station in Bristol to see how a modern one is built.

What they found, according to the presentation, is a set of buildings that have had very little done to them. Since the early 2000s, Blonski said, the stations have received only basic maintenance, and they now face aging heating, cooling, plumbing, electrical, and roofing systems. The job, meanwhile, has changed. Training requirements have grown, operational demands have grown, and a modern fire station is expected to do something the old ones cannot — keep firefighters' living quarters and contaminated turnout gear separated from the apparatus bays, a health-and-safety standard the current buildings were never designed around.

The committee's first instinct was the inexpensive one — replace the failing mechanical systems and move on. It decided that would be a band-aid. So it priced the alternatives. An extensive renovation of each station ran $5.5 million to $12 million; demolishing a station and building new ran $9 million to $10 million. The gap between the two was narrow, and new construction came with advantages a renovation could not promise: efficient modern layouts, more predictable construction, and no risk of opening a wall and finding a structural problem nobody budgeted for.

So the committee landed on new construction — with one deliberate exception. The Farmington fire station sits inside the Farmington Historic District, and the committee, after reviewing both available land in Farmington Village and design options for the existing building, recommended that it be preserved and expanded rather than torn down. That is the $12.1 million line, and the most expensive of the three.

The through-line of the presentation was the volunteer system itself. Farmington runs a predominantly volunteer fire department, supplemented by nine full-time career firefighters and EMTs and a private ambulance service — an arrangement Blonski said remains significantly more cost-effective than a fully career-staffed department. But a volunteer system needs buildings that help recruit and keep volunteers, and the committee noted that volunteerism is declining across Connecticut and the country. The committee said it built the recommendation to serve the town for "the next 50 plus years," and to leave room to adapt if Farmington's staffing model changes over that span.

Council members did not argue. "They take care of us," said Bruce L. Polsky, a First District Democrat. "I think it's incumbent on us to take care of them and make sure they have a great work environment and a safe work environment. I know it's a lot of money, but I think it's something that would be really important."

Wlodkowski put the timing in context. The town has spent recent years on the high school project and then the 1928 building renovation that produced its new Town Hall, he noted, while the fire stations stayed on basic maintenance. It was, he said, "more than overdue to take a look at where we are today."

The case against three stations

The dissent came from Tim Kelly.

Kelly — a Westview resident the Mercury has written about before for exactly this kind of line-by-line attention to the town's numbers — told the council he had sat in on a number of the ad hoc committee's meetings going back more than a year. He did not dispute that the stations need work. His objection was to the plan's scope and its price.

"The initial thought process was that we could spend $9 million and address the key issues at each of the three main stations," Kelly said. "Then as the wants and needs requirements list grew, the price tag quickly escalated to $18 million. Now it looks like the proposed recommendation has doubled again in cost to, we'll say, not exceed $36 million." Given the town's "record of project management over the last decade," he added, the multi-year, multi-facility proposal "will certainly exceed any initial cost estimate."

Kelly's alternative was one he said the ad hoc committee never seriously examined: instead of rebuilding all three stations on footprints set at "some earlier points in our history," consolidating to two larger, modern stations — one on each side of the river. Fewer buildings, he argued, would mean lower construction and maintenance costs, less duplicated equipment, and less to staff, "be it professional force or volunteer." The town's demographics are changing, he said. "I'd like to see us find a way to objectively evaluate options other than essentially rebuilding the current station footprint."

Kelly said he was not against the fire service. He voted for the last station renovation, he said, about 20 years ago. "I'd love to stay with what we've got. But given the enormous cost factor, I think we owe it to the community to really do diligence on this proposal."

Whether that particular diligence happens is, by the council's own action, an open question. The charge the council adopted for the Fire Station Building Committee instructs it to "focus on advancing the proposed project rather than repeating the preliminary evaluation process." Studying whether to consolidate is, by definition, an evaluation question — the part of the work the charge tells the new committee not to revisit.

On the council, the existing footprints read as a feature rather than a problem. Keith Vibert, a Second District Republican, said he was glad the plan keeps each station on its current property — Tunxis Hose, he noted, "feels strongly about being in the center of Unionville." The volunteer departments, he said, had "waited their turn."

The road to a referendum

The Fire Station Building Committee's first job is to hire an architect and a third-party cost estimator to turn the statement of needs and budget range into schematic designs and preliminary pricing. That package returns to the council for approval. From there, under Section 53 of the town code, the project would go to a referendum; if voters approve, the committee proceeds to final design and construction.

The council seated only part of that committee on May 12 — Wlodkowski and the chiefs of the three volunteer fire departments as voting members, with the town manager, the assistant town manager, the director of public safety, an architect, and a clerk as non-voting members. Wlodkowski said the rest of the panel, "some quality individuals that we're talking to," would be named by the council's first June meeting. The committee will also have to decide an order of operations: as Vibert noted, the town is unlikely to build all three stations at once.

The financing question is the one without a clean answer. Unlike school construction, which Connecticut reimburses municipalities at a statutory rate, fire stations carry no comparable formula — that, Wlodkowski explained, "doesn't exist for public safety" at the municipal level. William "Bill" Beckert, a Second District Democrat who joined the meeting remotely, said the path instead runs through the legislature and the state bond commission. The town, he said, would have to "leverage our state delegation" to ask the bonding commission for help. A member of Farmington's state delegation, speaking during public comment, pledged to pursue whatever grant and bonding money could be found for the project.

Beckert also noted the council had seen this coming. During the recent budget season, he said, it deliberately "put the brakes" on a planned project at the town hall annex — in part because the fire-station bill was already on the horizon.

For now, Farmington has a number — $30 million to $35 million — a committee assigned to sharpen it, and a resident on the record asking whether anyone checked the cheaper door. The council finishes naming the committee in June.

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— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's committees long enough to know that "we'll say, not exceed $36 million" is the kind of number that only goes up. He is on his third coffee. He is rooting for the cost estimator. ☕

*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering — the ad hoc committee that met for sixteen months, the public commenter who read the cost estimates more closely than some of the people voting, the referendum that is still a building committee, an architect, and a cost estimator away. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it: by the time you read this, the dust has settled, the votes are counted, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰