The plan, however, would be contingent on the department obtaining a variance from the township’s zoning commission — a process that would take a lot of staff time.
Before beginning that work, ,Klussman said he wanted to get direction from the board of trustees.
“It’s a purposeful training facility that’s modular — this is not what you see in a traditional (training) tower," Klussman said in a presentation to trustees.
“This is scalable and designed for what ... our needs are now. It remains very flexible.”
The training center would provide realistic training including hose movement, water flow, obstacles, low-light operations, medical and rescue situations.
“We (could) replicate medical emergencies, patient movement, high stress decision making, and environments that more closely resemble what calls we actually respond to,” Klussman said.
Most importantly, the facility would allow the department to train together as a group and/or with neighboring jurisdictions without adversely affecting response time if calls came in during training, Klussman said.
Current facility
Liberty Township firefighters now use Butler Tech adult and high school facilities its regional public safety complex in the northwest corner of the township.
The concern there is because response time from that location in case of a call during training, to other areas of the township could be as high as 13-15 minutes.
Training director Chris Oakes said the long response time “is a very big gap in time when you’re talking about a fire growing or somebody not breathing.”
The training center would be used 36-50 times a year for township-wide training along with mandated training with mutual aid partners and weekly training by members of each station.
Klussman said he budgeted about $637,000 over two years for the facility, should trustees decide to move forward. That number could be reduced by a potential partnership in discussion.
“I’m still trying to get my arms around $650,000 versus what we’re spending right now for training,” said Trustee Steve Schramm.
“It seems to be there’s a lot of room to move inside of the training budget right now and it would be a whole lot less money.”
There is no timeline set for trustees to make a decision on moving forward with applying for a zoning variance, said Christy Gloyd, township spokeswoman.
There will be more discussion once the board gets additional data based on the presentation.
“What I heard from you tonight, (is) the benefit is that this gives us the ability to have our entire team together more frequently than what we have today with higher quality training,” said Trustee Todd Minniear.
“The benefit is we’re more prepared when we need to be.”
About the Author