(Lake Park)– The Lake Park City Council Monday evening tabled action on a proposed purchase agreement for some land for a potential new fire station. Council members took the action after expressing concern over some wording in the proposal. Mayor Matt Carstensen…
“The seller is asking us to make it a single use, a fire department, use piece of property for eternity. The issue might become if we would build a fire department and then 50 years down the road we’ve outgrown that piece of property or we’ve outgrown that building then what do we do with it? Because if we all we can ever do with it is a fire department then that puts limitations on us as a city.”
Carstensen adds it would make no sense for the city to purchase the land with that limitation on it, then not be able to get a bond passed to finance a new fire station…
“That’s what we’d like to send back to the seller is that, you know, put a contingency clause in there that if the fire station is approved on a public vote, then we’d go ahead with the purchase of the piece of property.”
Carstensen adds that as of now they have not looked at any other possible sites, nor have any plans for a new station been drawn up yet…
“But we do intend on doing that shortly, trying to figure out how that might all look. The cost of building these days is almost staggering so we need to be mindful of what we plan on spending on this. It will go to a public vote, it’s not something that the city council can make a decision on so I think it would be in our best interested and also the fire department’s best interest to present a plan that people would be in favor of. That’s going to take some planning, some thought, on how that might work.”
For now, the proposed land purchase agreement has been sent back to the City Attorney for further review and revision.
