Oconto Falls officials visit fire stations

Oconto Falls city officials were scheduled to visit Suamico and Greenville on Dec. 20 to tour recently completed fire stations and get an understanding of what is possible for the city’s new facility.

Fire Chief Tim Magnin told the Oconto Falls City Council on Dec. 13 that they want to focus on the most practical uses for their $7 million grant from the state Department of Administration Neighborhood Investment Fund, one of several programs created to distribute federal American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated to the State of Wisconsin.

“We looked at a lot of other departments, but we thought: ‘We’re going to start looking at too many.’ In some of these places, we’d be looking at kind of pretty high-end, full-time service, which would waste our time,” Magnin said. “We can spend our time and money on other things; we want to keep the ball rolling.”

The plan is to build an approximately 19,000-square-foot fire station at the intersection of Union and Chestnut avenues and Columbia Street, on the south side of Memorial Park. The grant specifies that the department must move into the new building by the end of 2024.

City Administrator Peter Wills acknowledged that after consulting with architectural firm Wendel Five Bugles Design, the Oconto Falls facility will not be on the same scale as the Suamico fire station, which can be seen from U.S. Highway 41 near the County Road B interchange.

“Some of the initial proposals that they were showing us similar to Suamico, the feedback that we had gotten is that would probably cost us about $8.7 million.”

The council agreed to hire Zeise Construction to serve as construction manager. Zeise was one of three firms that submitted proposals, including Keller and Miron. Two other companies opted not to submit, Wills said.

“I think they’re all good firms,” Wills said. “I think the main difference was in management costs. Keller’s management costs were about 2.5 times higher than the others, and Zeise provided a more specific list of actual costs.”

Magnin said the fire department’s committee spent four hours reviewing the fine points of the various proposals. In an informal scoring system, Zeise came in at 100, Miron at 95 and Keller at 65, he said.

“(Zeise) answered everything in the RFP (request for proposals) questionnaire that we wanted; that was the key thing,” Magnin said. He added that Zeise is the most local of the three firms, being based in Green Bay, and the company president would be the company’s representative on site. “It’s a smaller company, but it’s a smaller building. We just thought it was a really good fit.”

Zeise worked on the Suamico and Kaukauna fire stations, as well as St. Anthony School in Oconto Falls, he said.

Representatives from Wendel Five Bugles Design and Zeise are expected to sit in when city officials hold their next meeting on the project in early January, Wills said.