Construction is underway on College Station’s Fire Station No. 7—the first station the city has added in over a decade.
Station No. 7 is anticipated to open this fall off Greens Prairie Road to address rising emergency response times in the southern part of the city, Fire Chief Richard Mann said in an interview.
“This is on the far south side of College Station, and there’s just so much growth over there and so many new homes, so many more people, schools and all of that, so this really is necessary for response times to make sure [emergency crews are] able to respond quickly enough, so I think it’s really exciting for the community to have this,” said Jennifer Cain, College Station’s director of capital projects.
The gist
Officials broke ground on the city’s seventh fire station in April 2025 at 2981 Greens Prairie Road, College Station, which is being funded by city bond dollars. In 2022, voters approved a bond proposition totaling $18 million for the design and construction of the fire station, Cain said.
Mann said construction is totaling about $13.1 million for the station, plus over $2 million for the fire apparatus that will be housed at the station; the new fire truck is on track to be delivered in July. Once operational, Station No. 7 is expected to add around $2 million to $2.5 million annually to the department’s operating budget, Mann said during an annual report given to City Council members Feb. 12.
The 18,200-square-foot station will have four bays for emergency response vehicles, private dorms and a kitchen. Similar to stations 3, 5 and 6, Station No. 7 will also house a community room available to the public for local meetings of up to 20-25 people, he said.
“It’s just an opportunity for us to interact with the community and let them come use the building that they spent money to build,” Mann said.
Also of note
Mann said 24 additional staff—including paramedics—are needed to open the station.
Of the 12,008 emergency calls the College Station Fire Department responded to in 2025, Mann said 70% of calls were medical-related, as the city has a contractual agreement with Brazos County to provide emergency medical services.
“We do provide all of the EMS service in south Brazos County, so the emergency services, the ambulance that’s located at that spot [at Station No. 7] is equally important as the fire apparatus,” Mayor John Nichols said in an interview.
As such, Mann said the department has focused on increasing its number of paramedics as well as its staff. To staff Station No. 7, he said the department hired the first cohort of 12 employees in March 2025 with salaries and benefits fully paid for the first three years through a $3.87 million grant from the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response Grant Program. Another 12 staff will start March 30 with salaries and benefits partially funded by a $2.57 million SAFER Grant, he said.
Measuring the impact
Station No. 7 is expected to improve emergency response times for both fire- and medical-related calls citywide, Mann said, as the city will have more resources to deploy to emergencies.
In 2025, the department received multiple calls at the same time 81% of the time, he said.
“Our capacity will increase when Station No. 7 comes on board this year,” Mann said to City Council. “While we may continue to have 80% overlapping calls, we’ll have a greater resource capacity for that extraordinary event that may happen during that time.”
Nine out of 10 times in 2025, the College Station Fire Department responded to fire calls in 6 minutes and 36 seconds and to EMS calls in 6 minutes and 44 seconds, according to department data. This is 12 and 14 seconds, respectively, longer than the national standard, Mann said.
“Every minute counts, every second counts,” he said to council members.
Response times include the time to dispatch the call, leave the station and travel to the emergency; Mann said the goal is for every emergency to be within a four-minute travel time from a station.
When the city debuted its last station—No. 6—in 2012, Mann said emergency response times decreased across the whole city, and he anticipates response times to decrease citywide again once Station No. 7 opens.
The city’s southern area, which is rapidly growing, is currently served by Station No. 3 off Barron Road, he said. This means crews at Station No. 3 are pulled away to respond to a call closer to Station No. 7, leaving them farther from Station No. 3 to respond to emergencies.
“It’s kind of this trickle-down effect that impacts the entire city, so even though we’re going to open it on the south side of the city, I expect we’ll see impacts across the entire city of College Station,” Mann said.
Going forward
The fire department’s call volume has increased 6% over the last five years, which correlates to College Station’s population growth in that time, Mann said.
Station No. 7 will help the city keep abreast of that growth, Nichols said.
“I’m excited about the new fire station. I think it’s well located,” Nichols said. “The city has undeveloped land in that area that’s rapidly turning into housing, so this will just be a great asset to keeping their insurance rates low and serving them adequately.”
Mann said Station No. 7, by design, has more bays than what’s initially needed to house fire apparatus, as room is set aside for more equipment to keep up with the area’s growth.
“You don’t build a station very often," he said. “We want to build something for today but also that will be serving the community 50 years from now.”
