Potsdam Fire turns to village for help with space issues

POTSDAM - The village’s fire station would be the perfect size – if it was 1913 and firefighters still rode horses-drawn carriages.

Concerns over the crowded conditions in its Main Street station has brought Potsdam’s Fire Department back to where it was two years ago, pleading with the village for help in either expanding the facility or finding it a new home.

The department has long outgrown its 99-year-old station and is in dire need of a new or larger space, according to Comprehensive Planning Committee member and former fire chief Joseph P. Gallagher.

“It’s at the point where you just about need a shoehorn to get in and out of that building,” Mr. Gallagher told the committee Wednesday night.

The Fire Department has called the small station home since 1913. But the building was designed to house horse-drawn carriages, not engines with 100-foot ladders, Mr. Gallagher told the group.

With the last major renovation taking place over two decades ago, the improvements are long overdue, he said.

Fire engines are parked just inches away from one another, and the lack of space has become an issue of operational maintenance, Mr. Gallagher said.

“We need to develop a plan to address the problem,” he said. “It’s not going to go away anytime soon.”

The former fire chief’s suggestion comes as the 15-member planning committee continues to develop its 10-year plan for the future of the village.

“This is absolutely something that needs to be done in the duration of this plan,” Mr. Gallagher said.

Committee members agreed, deciding to include the suggestion of developing a way “to relieve the fire department of its space limitations.”

How that will be accomplished, either with a new space or renovations to the current one, remains to be seen, they said.

“I don’t know if we should find a new building or expand the existing building or what we’re going to do,” Mayor and Committee Chair Steven W. Yurgartis said.

This is not the first time Mr. Gallagher has presented the Fire Department’s plight to village officials. In 2010 he approached Village Trustees with a request of $1.5 million dollars for the addition of a new wing.

He presented officials with an identical argument then, telling the board that his department had simply outgrown the facility.

Still the department has yet to see anything from the village in way of help on the issue, he said.

“We need to move faster,” Mr. Gallagher said Wednesday night.