- October 8, 2024
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By a unanimous vote, the Palm Coast’s historic Fire Station 22 will remain.
The Palm Coast City Council unanimously approved preserving the 50-year-old fire station while still adding 90 parking spaces to the Palm Coast Community Center. The city began exploring options to expand the Community Center’s parking spaces in February 2023 when an analysis from an architecture firm showed the fire station needed expensive refurbishments to meet current codes.
The council’s approval on Oct. 1 enables city staff to begin the design process for parking lot project. The scope and final approval of a design contract with a firm will be brought back to the City Council later on for final approval before any money is spent.
The Community Center has 138 parking spaces, though the city’s land development code requires 193. Based on data from event attendances, city architect Eric Gebo said, 250 total parking spaces are needed.
As it stands, because of the limited parking, the city has had to turn away, on average, seven meeting events per month, Gebo said. The council had two design options to choose from.
The first option preserved the fire station and expanded the parking lot into an adjacent, wooded lot on the fire station’s east site to create 90 new parking spaces.
That would bring the total Community Center parking spaces to 228 and is estimated to cost $2.2 million to do so. The $2.2 million includes mitigation and drainage work that will be required to expand into the adjacent eastern lot.
The city would need to pay an additional $1.1 million to renovate Fire Station 22. As it is, the building is not up to code, which is one of the reasons the city is building a new Fire Station 22 down the road.
Option two would demolish the fire station and build 85 new parking spaces, which would be estimated to cost $1.65 million. For an additional $1.1 million, the city could also expand into the fire station’s adjacent east lot and build an additional 36 spaces.
With the east lot expansion, that would have brought the Community Center’s parking to 259 spaces for a total estimated cost of $2.75 million. Both design proposals include the parking lot entrance as directly across the Community Center's southern exit, making a natural ingress and egress, Gebo said.
Stormwater and Engineering Director Carl Cote said that the city had $3.5 budgeted for this project in its five-year, capital projects.
Council members Theresa Carli Pontieri and Nick Klufas strongly supported preserving the building.
“I think this facility can be reprogrammed to solve a lot of the problems that we have in our community today,” Klufas said.
Though nothing is finalized, Pontieri suggested that the fire station building, once retired, could be turned into a museum or historical center for Palm Coast and potentially be the new home of the Palm Coast Historical Society.
“We are a city of 107,000 residents and our historical society is camping out in a small building in the back of Holland Park, and they deserve better,” Pontieri said. “Our city deserves better.”
Whatever is to become of the fire station likely won’t happen for several years as the building is still an active fire station until its replacement is built and operational.
Palm Coast Historical Society President Kathy Reichard-Ellavsky said during public comment that Palm Coast needs to demonstrate that it values saving its “economic, environmental and civic benefits of saving historic places” by preserving Fire Station 22.
“Fire station number 22 helps tell the story of a community that was created by an international conglomerate out of a pine covered swamp and the civic minded people who gave that community its heart and soul,” she said.
Council member Charles Gambaro Jr. supported the option to preserve the fire station said he’d like to take the time to tour the site with staff before he approves the final contract at a later date.
“I’m a requirements guy,” he said. “But I also think it’s important to look after our history.”
Pontieri said she believes it to be very important for Palm Coast to preserve its history.
“Once we remove this building there’s no going back,” Pontieri said.
