On Oct. 28, Prince George residents voted in favour of replacing Fire Hall No. 1 downtown and build a replacement for the Four Seasons Pool.
In the referendum, 82.79 per cent of voters (6,520 votes) approved borrowing $15 million to replace the fire hall, while 62.48 per cent of voters (4,923 votes) supported borrowing $35 million to build a new pool to replace the Four Seasons.
Pending final approval, the city will replace the 1950s-era fire hall downtown with a modern, centrally-located hall on the southwest corner of Massey Drive and Carney Street next to the YMCA. That will increase the area fire crews from the hall can reach in eight minutes by nearly 50 per cent, according to Prince George Fire Rescue.
"This referendum result will give us an opportunity to improve what is already a really terrific service, and allow us to provide that to the city," fire chief John Iverson told The Citizen in October.
Seven firefighters and a minimum of two emergency dispatchers are based at the fire hall 24 hours a day. In addition, the fire hall is the base for training and administration staff.
"The city has grown from its footprint in 1956 (when Fire Hall No. 1 opened). And it's clearly grown south and west, and the fire hall location was good in 1956, but looking at it today it's not in the right location," Iverson said. "This is a great opportunity to move that hall to a proper location as well as have our staff operating our of modern facility where we can properly staff our trucks and put the right trucks in the right location."
Businesses in the BCR industrial site will be among several locations which will benefit from the move to a new fire hall location, Iverson said.
"This will allow us to get our crews to many more addresses within eight minutes and that's really important in fire fighting, because it gives you the best opportunity to confine the fire to the room of origin where it started," he said. "That reduces property loss and reduces risk of death and injury to the citizens As first responders we want to get to people that need our help as quickly as possible and we've just decreased the response time to so many more people in the city by moving that fire hall to a better location."
Also pending final approval, the city will build a new swimming pool at 600 Quebec St., the current location of the Days Inn downtown.
The hotel building will have to be purchased, at a cost of $4.5 million, and the hotel and the old pool will have to be demolished at an estimated cost of $2.5 million.
Those costs aren't included in the approximately $35 million needed to build a new pool, and will be covered by other sources of city finances.
According to the city, the Four Seasons Pool doesn't meet modern safety standards, and would need $10.3 million in repairs and upgrades to continue operating.
The proposed new pool is planned to include a therapy-toddler pool, a leisure pool with a wading zone, play features and a slide.
"The pool got 60-plus per cent of the vote and that was a message from the residents that they recognize that the Four Seasons Pool is old as well and it needed a tremendous amount of work," Mayor Lyn Hall said in October. "It just wasn't going to work... shutting that one down for a couple years and building a new one in the same location. We knew that one pool - the Aquatic Centre - couldn't handle extra 100,000 or 115,000 visits a year. There are a tremendous amount of people who use that pool and the pool in its location downtown provides an attraction and hopefully people will spend more time downtown. We wanted to make that one of the focal points of downtown."
Hall said construction of the two new facilities will likely begin in late 2018 or early 2019. Construction of the pool is expected to take two years, while the fire hall is planned for completion in 2019.
A total of 7,875 city residents voted in the referendum.
