By Emily Ramshaw
The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 2006 The Dallas Morning News
Lt. P.S. McWha and his Dallas Fire-Rescue colleagues at Station 32 have vitally important jobs: They save residents from fires and deadly accidents every day.
But you wouldn’t know it from looking at their 55-year-old Pleasant Grove firehouse.
Floors sag and paint-flaked walls crack. Roofs leak, and exposed wires dangle from the ceiling. Equipment spills out of crowded lockers and closets, and a rusting chain link fence is fortified with barbed wire.
Their engines and ambulance are housed in an unventilated garage that doubles as their fitness facility - which reached a temperature of 127 degrees last summer.
“We’ve all chipped in to buy our own A/C units, to buy our own heaters,” Lt. McWha said, leaning against the 35-year-old kitchen stove they recently retired because of its carbon monoxide fumes. “When people drive by, this is what they see.”
If Lt. McWha is lucky, it won’t be for much longer.
A $1.35 billion bond package on the Nov. 7 ballot allocates about $86 million for public safety improvements, including just over $50 million to overhaul or replace nine Dallas fire stations.
Station 32, one of the city’s worst and oldest, would be replaced with a state-of-the-art facility twice the size of the current one off Jim Miller Road, at a cost of $5.5 million.
The public safety portion of the bond package - listed under ballot Propositions 10 and 12 - includes more than $3 million to upgrade the city’s 117 emergency sirens, which warn of tornados but are bogged down with “old technology,” Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm said. An additional $9 million would go toward routine construction and repairs at police and fire stations citywide, which are supposed to have a 40-year life span.
The propositions also set aside close to $24 million to buy property in Cadillac Heights for the future Dallas Police Academy.
Several police and fire stations have gone without upgrades for decades.
“It’s been more than 40 years since we redid a lot of them,” Ms. Suhm said of police and fire stations, citing changes in technology and the need to provide gender-neutral facilities for women. “They’re in woeful need.”
Forty-one Dallas police recruits sit in the stuffy police academy classroom meant for 35, squished elbow to elbow as they’re lectured on the penal code.
Others in facility
They share the crowded Red Bird-area facility with 100 other students every day for 32 weeks - on top of the 3,000 incumbent officers who swing through routinely for their biannual training. The students weave through hallways that look more like obstacle courses, the result of a dearth of storage space. They rotate through the academy’s single physical training room and have to drive to the Mountain Creek firing range.
“Some days, it feels like we spend more time tearing equipment down and setting it up than we do focusing on instruction,” said Sgt. D.M. Welch, who teaches basic training defensive tactics at the academy.
Simply put, said Deputy Chief Floyd Simpson, who oversees the Police Department’s personnel and development division, the current police academy doesn’t cut it. And the facility opened as a temporary training site nearly two decades ago will continue to swell, Sgt. Welch said, as the Police Department reaches for its goal of hiring and training about 600 new officers.
The new police academy would solve these space problems, creating a “police campus” that includes training facilities, a driving track and a shooting range, Chief Simpson said.
“It would really enhance the experience,” he said.
Just the land
But while the 2006 bond package would give the city the funds to buy the lots it needs for the academy, money for the actual campus facilities won’t come until a later bond program, Ms. Suhm said.
The land acquisition “is an important first step,” she said. “But this is a long-term commitment.”
City Council member Pauline Medrano, whose district includes Cadillac Heights, said residents there have been subject to flooding and crime problems for years. She said she’s making every effort to educate them on the reasons for the land acquisition, as well as the timing.
“When it floods there, as it often does, these people suffer,” she said. But “it could be next year, or it could be four more years” before their properties are purchased by the city.