Northbrook Firehall build confirmed

Jeff Green | Feb 02, 2014

Addington Highlands Council has accepted the bid from Task Force Engineering of Belleville for the construction of a four-bay fire hall on a township-owned lot on Hwy. 41, about two kilometres south of Northbrook.

Reeve Henry Hogg said that construction is set to start in the spring.

The building will be a rigid frame steel structure building. Although the final costs of the contract are still being worked out, Hogg said the project will easily cost over $1 million. Once the land and pre-engineering costs are factored in the total price could approach $1.5 million.

The township has been setting aside money for the new fire hall for three years, and will continue to pay for the project into the future, well after the building is completed.

“If we tried to pay for that in one year we would have to put in a 20% tax increase,” said Hogg, “but since we have already built a contribution towards the building into our budgets it will not have a significant impact on the tax rate this year.”

The township had originally planned to build a fire hall/township office on the site, but when faced with daunting costs they decided to build a stand-alone fire hall and leave open the option to build onto the end of the building or to build a stand-alone office on the site sometime in the future.