Vineyard breaks ground on city’s first fire station, coming in 2025
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- Orem firefighters and Vineyard Mayor Julie Fullmer pose for a photo at the groundbreaking ceremony for Vineyard’s first fire station Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024, in Vineyard.
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- City officials pose for a photo during the groundbreaking ceremony for Vineyard’s first fire station Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024.
Vineyard broke ground on its first fire station Wednesday morning, with plans of constructing what the city calls an “innovative firehouse module.”
Located at West Sicula Road and West 80 South, the station will be built like a home to assimilate into the surrounding residential neighborhood and will be ran by the Orem Fire Department, which is contracted to handle firefighting duties in Vineyard.
The location is designed to lower response times for emergencies in Vineyard, and the station’s target completion date is July 2025.
City officials and council members from Vineyard, Orem and Lindon along with Orem firefighters were on hand for the groundbreaking ceremony.
“I’m sure there are fire stations that are built like fire homes throughout the country, but not in Utah. This is a unique opportunity,” Orem Fire Chief Marc Sanderson said.
Vineyard, a rapidly growing community, has spent years looking into acquiring its own fire station. Numerous factors were weighed in determining where to place the station, including traffic, projected growth and response times.
The decision to place it inside a neighborhood and design it like a home was a collective one, said Vineyard Mayor Julie Fullmer. According to a city spokesperson, the developer of the land, Home Center Construction, gave the city a good deal for two lots and helped combine the property to make the process seamless.
“We had this big team on board. As the conversation evolved, we thought, ‘What if we put it in this community?'” Fullmer said. “We had developers who were asking, ‘How do we become part of this project too?’ We worked with a great design team, Orem Fire and key stakeholders to help shape the current design. It’s been a very collaborative, thorough process, and through time, it molded into this concept to combine these lots and build inside the community where we felt that we could provide the best services.”
Vineyard spent several years saving money to acquire a bond for the project but ended up saving the entirety of the project’s cost, according to Fullmer. The city has $1.7 million to build the station but hopes to spend just $1.5 million.
“The money that we saved was enough to build entirely and we thought, ‘We’re not going to move past that opportunity because this is such a good opportunity for our residents,'” Fullmer said.
The unique design combined with the price tag puts the city and fire department in a flexible position, officials believe.
“This isn’t a $12 million fire station that other communities build that has to stand the test of time,” Sanderson said. “This gives us an opportunity, (with the station) built like a home using taxpayer dollars, that in the future if we and Vineyard determine this isn’t the best location based off of population and call volume, we have the ability to sell this as a home and relocate a fire station at a much cheaper cost than what other communities do.”
Orem’s fire station on 1200 West currently serves the Vineyard community. Adding a new station in town is intended to cut response time. Fullmer said the goal is to meet a response time of four minutes or less for residents — time that could make all the difference in case of an emergency.
