LONGVIEW — For about seven years, roughly a dozen firefighters assigned to Woodland’s Scott Avenue station have spent their 48- to 96-hour shifts in a three-bedroom modular home near their unfinished fire station.
In August, Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue aims to change that a levy lid lift to return the 2017 levy to its original rate. The rate dropped 24 cents per $1,000 of assessed value as property values increased.
The department said emergency service costs rise about 6 percent each year, while levy revenue can only increase 1 percent each year under state law. The levy lid lift would change that.
“If you only got a 1 percent cost increase every year at your job, and everything else goes up … at some point you have to ask your employer for a bump,” Clark-Cowlitz Fire Rescue chief John Nohr said.
The proposed increase would cost the owner of a $600,000 home in the district — which includes Woodland, Ridgefield and La Center, along with unincorporated areas in Clark and Cowlitz counties — about $900 a year, or $150 more than they are paying under the current rate.
That levy lid lift would remain over the next six years.
Department officials say they need the increase to pay for two new fire engines, maintain current staffing and to build and complete fire stations, including Woodland’s building at 250 E. Scott Ave., near the city’s police station.
Construction began in January 2017 and ended in the fall of the same year, Nohr said.
The city of Woodland covered the initial $1.5 million to build the current 3,300-square-foot apparatus bay and install 70 pilings into the ground to make the station earthquake resistant. This was before the city was annexed into the fire district in 2020.
The district covered about $150,000 to buy and outfit the modular home.
When four firefighters are at the station, two have to double up in one of the rooms of the modular home, which doesn’t have training space or a meeting room, Nohr added.
Right now, a minimum of three crew members — one captain and two firefighters — are working out of the building 24 hours a day.
But more staff will likely be needed as emergency calls increase with population.
Across the district, calls are up around 40 percent compared to when the fire levy was passed in 2017, the department reports.
In Woodland, population rose about 19% from 2010 to 2020 to 6,531 resident, according to the 2020 Census.
Nohr said the department plans to add another 5,700 square feet to the apparatus bay building if the levy lid lift passes.
The finished fire station would have space for six personnel and for crews to conduct training exercises, complete reports, and work on and store equipment.
The completion would be about $4.5 million, Nohr said, and would come from limited-term general obligation bonds or loans from the existing general fund approved by fire commissioners.
