Farmington has decided to rebuild its fire stations, and now it has the people who will figure out how.
At its first meeting on Friday, July 17, the town's newly seated Fire Station Building Committee took formal control of a project the Town Council has already scoped and priced: two new fire stations, one major renovation, and a total budget the committee put at $30 million to $35 million. None of it happens unless Farmington voters approve the borrowing at referendum, and the committee is aiming to put that question on a ballot in 2027.
That makes the first meeting less of a beginning than a handoff. The committee is not being asked whether to build. It is being asked to design the project, price it precisely, and convince the town to pay for it.
The charge, already written
Most building committees start with a blank page. This one started with a decision.
The groundwork came from an ad hoc fire station committee that the Town Council established in January 2025 and that spent roughly 16 months on the question. Town Manager Kathleen Blonski, whose contract the Council extended to 2030 last month, presented that committee's findings to the new group. She walked through how it reviewed facility studies dating back to 2014, met with each volunteer fire chief, toured the existing stations, and visited Bristol's new fire station for comparison. The conclusion the Council adopted, and handed to this committee as its charge, is specific:
- A new East Farms fire station on its current site, estimated at $9 million.
- A new Tunxis Hose fire station on its current site, estimated at $10 million.
- A renovated and expanded Farmington fire station, the one in Farmington Village, estimated at $12.1 million.
Blonski put the distinction plainly. This committee, she said, is "not going back and saying what are we doing with the firehouses." The direction is already set: "We are building two new fire stations and renovating one, and we have a project budget cost, and that's what the Council wants us to stay within."
The Village station is the deliberate exception to the build-new approach. It sits in the Farmington Historic District, and the ad hoc committee, after reviewing both replacement land and renovation designs, recommended preserving the building and expanding it rather than replacing it. One committee member, Ted Sanford, is a Historic District Commission alternate and a co-owner of Sanford & Hawley, the Unionville building-materials firm his family has run since 1884, exactly the background the Village renovation will draw on.
Renovate or rebuild, and why rebuild won
The case for new construction turned on a narrower margin than one might expect.
According to Blonski's presentation, extensively renovating the existing stations was estimated at $5.5 million to $12 million per station. Building new ran $9 million to $10 million per station. The gap is real but not enormous, and once the committee weighed it against what renovation actually buys, new construction won on the merits: more efficient layouts, modern separation of living quarters from diesel exhaust, and fewer of the mid-project surprises that old buildings tend to produce.
The underlying problem is deferred maintenance. Since the early 2000s, Blonski said, the stations have received only basic upkeep, and the buildings now carry aging heating and cooling, plumbing, electrical, and roofing systems on top of layouts that no longer match how the fire service works.
There is also a strategic argument, and it is the one that gives the price tag its context. Farmington runs a predominantly volunteer fire department, complemented by nine full-time firefighter-EMTs and supported by a private ambulance service. A volunteer system is far cheaper than a career department, and the committee's argument is that modern stations are part of what keeps volunteers signing up. It is the same tension the Mercury has covered before: the volunteer force that makes Farmington's fire service affordable is not guaranteed to stay large.
"There's a lot of communities that that system is shrinking, if not just fully going away," said Dave Wlodkowski, a Town Council member and architect who co-chaired the ad hoc committee. He said the state legislature has taken notice of the strain on Connecticut's volunteer departments, and that Farmington intends to make its case: "I think what we can do is actually lobby for that support."
The referendum is the real deadline
Everything the committee does over the next year points at one date it does not yet control.
Because the project is funded by borrowing, it has to pass a town referendum. Blonski laid out the window: the question could go to voters during the spring budget cycle, in April or May, or on the November ballot, with 2027 the working target. Wlodkowski was blunt about the complication. A town-wide property revaluation lands next year, and asking residents to approve tens of millions in new borrowing in the same cycle their assessments change could, he suggested, push the vote to November.
That is why the committee's early work is as much communications as construction. Blonski described a two-pronged campaign to build referendum support: a written push through town newsletters and mailers, and an in-person one that takes the pitch to pancake breakfasts and open houses at the stations themselves, so residents can see what they are being asked to buy. The committee also intends to pursue state and federal grants aggressively to hold down the net cost to taxpayers, and Chair Brenda Bergeron raised federally directed spending as another possible avenue.
Bergeron is not a random pick for this chair. She represents East Farms as a resident member, but until February she was Deputy Commissioner of Connecticut's Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, and for years before that the state's attorney for emergency management and homeland security. Public Safety Director Paul Melanson, the town's police chief and director of fire services, recalled serving on a statewide school-security committee that Bergeron ran after the Sandy Hook shooting.
What happens next
The committee set its schedule at the first meeting, and it moves quickly. The next meeting, on July 24, is a bus tour of the three stations. From there the work is hiring an architect: a draft request for qualifications comes back for approval on August 19, responses are reviewed on September 25, and the committee interviews finalists on October 6. Farmington does not have to take the lowest bid on an architectural contract, Blonski noted, so qualifications, not price alone, will drive the selection.
Then comes the part that takes years: schematic designs, firmed-up prices, a referendum date, and a campaign to win it. The committee has seven voting members and needs four for a quorum. It meets, for the most part, every other Friday. This is not the town's first building committee to work this way. Blonski, who called this her second fire-station building committee, said the town reuses the same rules and structure across projects, most recently the 1928 town hall renovation and the high school.
Nobody on the committee pretended the number was small. They just started counting.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A fire station is built to last fifty years. The things people put in storage are usually hoping for the same deal, and Farmington Storage keeps them at institutional grade, no referendum required. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's building committees long enough to know that a first meeting with a $30 million charge is not, in fact, a slow news day. He is on his second coffee and has read the full statement of needs. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the Friday-morning building committee, the police log that is technically public record but that you would never find on your own, the zoning fight that decides what gets built on your street. We publish slowly and deliberately, and we stand behind our motto, Always last to breaking news. By the time you read this, the dust has settled and the facts are checked. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰