Fire Chief Les Stephens said the community support has been “overwhelming.”
“We had a lot of not just city employees and different departments throughout the city, but a really strong attendance by the new Trace community,” Stephens said.
Mayor Jane Hughson noted there was a lot of growth in that area with more coming.
“It is a wonderful feeling knowing that we've got more protection for our residents in an area that is growing very quickly,” Hughson said.
How it happened
Construction began in August 2021 and took nearly two years to complete due to numerous delays, most of which were caused by supply chain issues, according to Stephens.
“It wasn’t necessarily that COVID[-19] was the direct cause but what we dealt with was the effect of some of those people who had lost a lot of their workforce, supply chain issues, you name it. One thing after the next,” he said.
Stephens noted supplies such as air conditioning units and garage doors were being quoted six- to eight-month lead times, but they wouldn’t receive them for 12-13 months.
“You can’t just work around that,” he added.
Cost breakdown
The new station was financed through Trace, a master-planned housing community in San Marcos, which gave the fire department $500,000 to assist with the design and donated 2 acres of land, Stephens said.
"The Highpointe Trace developer came to the community and asked to be annexed into the city this piece of property that they planned to develop into what is now the T neighborhood. And when we did the analysis on that piece of property they were [going to] be an Insurance Services Offices Public Protection Classification of 10, and that's the worst you can get. That's because they were over 5 road miles from any of our existing stations," Stephens said.
He explained homeowners were going to have to pay high home insurance rates because of that, and the developer did not want that.
"They knew that would be an uphill battle to sell homes to people, knowing that they were going to be in such a high public protection classification," he added.
There will also be two payments of $750,000 each that will be paid to the department after two years of certification of occupancy and again at four years.
What else?
Prior to the new completion of the new station, the department had prolonged response times for the outlet mall area and the south side of town from having to send personnel from Station Nos. 3 or 4, which are located on Hunter Road and Wonder World Drive.
But Station No. 6 aims to assist with response times on the south side of town.
“We’re hoping this will be able to take of the development itself, Trace, the new development that’s coming in south of that, which is called Las Colinas; they can even go south on Old Bastrop and go down to York Creek and come into the interstate there at York Creek, and they can catch almost the entire city limits northbound without ever having to use a turnaround,” Stephens said.
