The West Covina City Council voted to spend $1.6 million on capital improvements to its fire stations on Tuesday night.
The 3-2 decision comes at a time when the city is preparing a corrective actions response to a report from the California State Auditor’s Office that ranked West Covina the ninth most at-risk city in the state, based on its fiscal health.
West Covina Fire Chief Vincent Capelle told the City Council on Tuesday night, Jan. 19, that the fire stations in West Covina are in dire need of repairs and maintenance.
Requested work includes roof repairs, plumbing work, electrical maintenance and asbestos removal. Fire stations also need mold removal, carpet replacement with hospital-grade linoleum and diesel exhaust ventilation systems, officials said.
“The can got kicked to the end of the road and this is it,” West Covina City Manager David Carmany said. “It was time for us to act and act decisively.”
Capelle said the exhaust ventilation systems are used to direct fumes from pumper engines, ladder trucks and rescue ambulances outdoors.
“In the old days, you just fired them up in the apparatus bay and breathed those fumes,” Capelle said. “We’re trying to get the stations so they have the proper ventilation. Those diesel gases are a known carcinogenic. It’s not to standard. We want to provide our firefighters and paramedics a safe place to work and to run from.”
West Covina Councilmember Tony Wu said one of the fire stations possibly needs to be condemned because it is in such dire need of repair. There are five fire stations in the West Covina Fire Department.
“That’s why I approved it,” Wu said. “Right now, we have this budget issue. But if we don’t do it, we will have major issues, for the city, for the staff. No matter what. It’s substandard.”
Carmany said Fire Department 1 on Sunset Avenue is “at the end of its useful life.”
“The city should look at other solutions to include replacing it,” Carmany said. “For now, we’re trying to do critical repairs to all of our stations. The other four, we’ve identified a long list of things that need to be done to give our firefighters proper facilities to run from.”
Wu questioned the timing of the repair and capital improvement request, given the pandemic and the financial problems the city is facing.
“For five years, I didn’t hear it,” Wu said. “But recently, with this new chief, last year he started pushing a lot of OSHA compliant issues.
“Now we have no choice to spend money for this so-called urgent repair. We have no choice.”
The agreement to pay for the capital improvements to the fire stations required having the fire chief report to the City Council every six months about maintenance and repair requests.
Carmany said the city has money to pay for the fire station capital improvements because of the pension obligation bonds passed last year to refinance pension payments. The city was able to refinance the interest rates on the pensions payments from 7% to 3.72% and reduce this year’s payment from $14 million to $3.5 million.
“We can afford it. We can’t afford to ignore it,” Carmany said.
“The things were reasonable and they are needs,” said West Covina Mayor Letty Lopez-Viado. “I wish they had kept bringing this up, little by little. To hit us all at one time, especially during a time when the budget is difficult, I wasn’t too pleased with that.”
West Covina City Councilmember Rosario Diaz said she would like to see a more detailed and itemized list of repairs and improvements for each station.
“I think that $1.6 million seems to be a lot of money. I just wonder, why now?” Diaz said. “It sounds to me like we had an issue about this years ago. Why didn’t we take care of it then?
“But I’m not opposed to renovating the fire stations.” she added. “I’m just concerned about the money that they want to spend on it.”
Ultimately, Diaz said, the safety of the firefighters is the biggest concern.
“I really want to protect our firefighters,” she said. “We need them. They are important to our community.”