The Sedona City Council and Sedona Fire District were scheduled to meet Wednesday, Dec. 18, to consider the options open to SFD for construction of a replacement Uptown fire station.
Discussion of the future fire station’s location so far has focused on two sites, SFD’s existing Station 4 at 391 Forest Road, which would require the acquisition of two neighboring parcels, and a city-owned property at 401 Jordan Road, but SFD Fire Chief Ed Mezulis has indicated that SFD favors the Jordan Road location for a number of logistical reasons, among which one stands out: Sedona’s famous red rock.
“It’s a flat site, it’s rectangular in shape, it will, more easily with the road setup, allow for pass-through bays,” Mezulis said of the Jordan Road site. “In order for us to build what is generally recognized as an appropriate structure, that has drive-through capacity and single-story, which is ideal for [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliance and getting crews out the door, we would have to acquire the two adjacent private properties to our current station to make a station work.
“There’s a significant elevation change from the top of the hill to the bottom and so naturally there’d be retaining walls and retention ponds, a lot of dirt preparation to be done to make a level building surface.”
“They had to put our power underground at Station 4 because of the construction, and anticipated a three-day dig, and it ended up being closer to three weeks because they had to bring in jackhammers,” Mezulis continued. “Based on what I’ve seen with the parking garage excavation and the need for blasting, and the trench work that they did last month at our current site, I can only anticipate that it’s solid rock under there and would be costlier and would be more difficult.”
Based on feedback from contractors, Mezulis estimated that the Forest Road site would require between $500,000 and $700,000 in preparatory work before any construction could begin on a new station. Reuse of the Forest Road site would also require that the city condemn the two neighboring parcels, 441 and 461 Forest Road, in order to transfer them to the district, which would involve additional costs.
“The district did go out and acquire recent appraisals for all those properties, so that we had an understanding from a dollar standpoint where we stand,” Mezulis added. “Our station property is $1.18 million, appraised, and the Jordan Road property, I believe, was $2.3 million, appraised, and then the two private properties were between $900,000 and $1.1 million, I believe.”
Coconino County’s current assessment places the cash value of 391 Forest at $962,501, while 441 Forest is assessed at $353,147, 461 Forest at $674,436 and 401 Jordan at $1,047,156.
Mezulis said the Forest Road location would be “a viable option but, again, anticipated additional costs with excavation and lot prep.”
While SFD has not yet done soil tests at 401 Jordan, “I can only assume that because it was an orchard in the 1900s, and they didn’t have equipment to dig the holes for the trees, that it was a good spot,” Mezulis said.
Across Forest Road, the excavation required for the under-construction Uptown garage, which included blasting away part of a hillside, added an additional $3.78 million to the project’s cost.
“You don’t know until you get into the rock, but as a background in geotech, just building it at grade would probably cut off up to like three to four months,” city Director of Public Works Kurt Harris said of the effect of the excavation work on the garage schedule. “It would have been more costly if we weren’t allowed to blast, because just having rock hammers and all that would take even more time. Now that we know we’re having challenges with geology, how the rock faulting is, it probably would have been good to see if we could have gone to a quarry and gotten a rock saw to cut the sides, to make a clear slice. Now we’re kind of getting into issues with the soil nailing and the rock nailing and all these issues. So then you have a nice clean cut. You can’t do that when you’re blasting or rock hammering. But you don’t know that until you do all the investigation, and the geotech investigation sometimes costs as much as just doing the work.”
Longtime Sedona contractor Herb Tiffany, of Tiffany Construction, previously weighed in on the challenges of doing construction work in the Sedona rock during a City Council meeting on March 12.
“The most prohibitive cost that we face here in Sedona is the rock excavation,” Tiffany said during a discussion of constructing affordable housing at the Sedona Cultural Park, which features similarly sloped topography to that of Uptown. “That’s what kills these kind of projects.”
“There could be any variation of the above,” Mezulis said. “Those are the two sites that we landed on. We looked at the little bowl down behind Coldwell [Banker], behind the Realtor [office] at Brewer Road. We kind of tossed around the idea of the old Forest Service property on Brewer. But it really just went back to landing on keeping the station in the Uptown character area … We were doing some archiving and cleaning last year, and we found some management meeting notes back to 1996 of leadership at Sedona Fire identifying the need to replace that station, so it’s been a long haul.”
