A new building coming to the east edge of Metamora provides the necessary facilities for full time emergency responders and room for the village to expand.
Village President John Cummings says the need for a new public safety building first appears in a 2014 comprehensive plan. It’s been a long process since then to make the project a reality.
“Unfortunately, there was no land in the village that we could find anywhere that was going to be reasonable enough to purchase for the village and then build this much more modern new public safety building that we wanted.” said Cummings.”
In 2019, a Metamora resident approached the village board to make them aware of farmland for sale on the community’s eastern border. Cummings was a village trustee at the time.
“It’s about 135 acres of farmland that was owned by some guys up in the Chicago area,” he said. “They were looking to sell it. And we thought, well, that would be a perfect place for any expansion that we were looking at for Metamora.”
All projects were put on hold by COVID shortly after the purchase, but now there’s a planned solar farm with Trajectory Energy Partners, senior-living apartments with Woda Cooper Companies and, of course, the new public safety building.
The new public safety building is estimated to be an $8 million project, with early designs from the engineering firm Farnsworth Group. It will house the village’s full time ambulance staff, as well as enable the village to bring on some full-time firefighters as an addition to their volunteer fire department. The current building serves for the EMT professionals, but only barely.
“It's really not big enough to handle the stuff that we need anymore, we need one that's ready to go and can be used by a bigger area,” said Cummings. “If we have to go outside this area, we can have more trucks, we can have more ambulances, something that we can expand if Metamora expands.”
Cummings says the move also allows for the previous fire department facility to serve as a public works garage and cold storage.
“All of our big trucks, like $150,000, dump trucks and things like that, they sit out 24/7, 365,” said Cummings. “And that's not good for the village, because that's the wear and tear on the trucks, etc, etc. So this way, we can have trucks inside pretty much all the time, especially in the wintertime.”
Currently, the Village of Metamora splits responsibilities with the Metamora Rural Fire Protection District. Both groups have pledged $2 million to the project and Cummings applied with Congressman Darin LaHood’s office for federal community project funding of an additional $4 million.
“Hopefully, our next step will be to go to the state government shortly and try to see if we can figure out a way to get some grant money for various projects within the village that will help us save some money in that way,” said Cummings. “So we can funnel some more of the money out there and get all that squared away out there for our future.”
There was concern about increased response times following a fire department move to an edge of town. There are several reasons Cummings believes the difference will be minimal.
“Because we're a volunteer fire department, we have a hard time and our response times anyway,” he said. “It's just, you're going to have that difficulty when you have people who are volunteers and have to come from all over the place, run here, get the trucks and then get out.”
Cummings also points out the fire department goes on approximately 15 to 20 calls a month, while the ambulance is called out once to twice a day. However, the majority of those ambulance calls are to the retirement community Snyder Village, which is very close to the proposed site for the new public safety building.
Cummings hopes the continued development on the east side property will help spur village growth, expand the tax base and provide funds for future projects like redoing the village square’s aging brick roads.
“We're looking at any number of other stuff, a lot of the stuff along the highway there,” Cummings said. “We're hoping maybe we can find businesses that would come in, we'd love to have a restaurant. But we'd be open to a lot of things, maybe some sports facilities out there. So there's a lot of stuff that's being talked about being used out there, which is kind of what we wanted to do with 135 acres.”
There is no specific timeline on the new public safety building yet, as the village is waiting to hear what it will receive of the requested $4 million in federal funding. But, even if they get less than that, Cummings says they’ll be starting on sewer, water and filing state applications for road entrances and exits as soon as possible.
