What happened?
Officials from Flower Mound, Highland Village and Lewisville celebrated the opening of the John Ashman Fire Training Complex on Feb. 10. The facility is named in honor of John Ashman, who served with the Lewisville Fire Department for 40 years before he died in May 2023.
The new facility is made up of a 3.5-story training tower and a two-story residential training structure that can be used for live fire training. It will be utilized for training firefighters from each of the three cities.
The background
The training facility is the product of a municipal partnership between Flower Mound, Highland Village and Lewisville. Officials broke ground on the $6.8 million project in January 2024 which is partially funded by each of the three municipalities.
Fire officials needed a new facility for live fire training since the existing tower located on the same site is more than 25 years old. Due to its age, it could no longer be used for live fire training, according to Lewisville city documents.
The new facility is located next to the existing tower. The new buildings will allow firefighters to train fire responses to different occupancy types. While each city will have dedicated training time, fire departments from each city will also have the ability to train together.
What officials are saying
Lewisville Mayor TJ Gilmore thanked officials from Highland Village and Flower Mound for their cooperation on the project and said it was a vision for all three cities to help improve its fire departments for residents.
“All three of our cities are going to get amazing training because they were able to pool resources to get a bigger and better facility than they could have done on their own,” Gilmore said.
Flower Mound Mayor Cheryl Moore said officials from each city communicate all the time and that communication was important.
“That communication between all our locales is so important,” she said. “With emergency services, that's where it starts. You want to make sure that all of us are communicating well, everyone's trained well, so that the response time and our resources are used effectively and this provides that opportunity to do so.”
Highland Village Mayor Charlotte Wilcox said the new training facility was “near and dear to my heart.” Ashman worked with Wilcox’s husband in the Lewisville Fire Department and he was very special to the Wilcox family, she said.
“For his name to be on this building is extremely special to us,” she said.
