The Great Falls Fire Rescue training center on 9th Street South is largely unusable, limiting firefighter training, risking their safety and by extension their ability to respond to all potential emergencies in the community.
That also comes with a potential cost, either in loss of property or injuries and since a training center is a factor in the Insurance Services Office’s determination of the city’s rating, which directly impacts insurance residential and commercial property insurance premiums.
During the Jan. 21 City Commission work session, GFFR Chief Jeremy Jones presented a proposal for $2.5 million, financed through non-voted general obligation debt, to revamp the training center.
The facility includes a five-story training tower that has been condemned and largely unusable since the spring of 2020 and in November, the two remaining roof props also failed; a general training building that currently has limited uses without electricity or heat; and a classroom building that gophers have damaged.
The City Commission approved $150,000 in the 2022 budget for repairs, but officials discovered they’d have to bring the facility up to current OSHA standards, rather than be grandfathered under the older standards as they’d hoped.
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“Unfortunately, we have reached another critical infrastructure failure,” Jones told commissioners on Jan. 21.
Jones and GFFR have been working to address the lack of training facilities for years. Those options included a proposal through the Montana Legislature to establish a regional training center, but that fell apart during the 2023 legislative session. Another option included selling the existing training center and collaborating the Great Falls College MSU to build a fifth fire station, and a training facility, on university land, but that option died with the 2023 levy failure.
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A new training center was not included in the bond and levy questions that were on the 2023 ballot.
Training is critical to a real response, Jones told commissioners.
“We must have a training center that is capable of meeting the needs of what our department trains on every day which is all hazards,” he said.
Jones reminded commissioners that when they gave public safety departments direction for the levy and bond, they developed, good, better, best options and the training center wasn’t even included in the best option because it made the ask cost prohibitive.
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The best option was a $35 million levy, a proposal that met swift community pushback.
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Commissioners opted to send a $21.17 million public safety infrastructure bond and a separate $10.7 million public safety operations levy.
Both failed.
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The levy and bond focused on fire coverage, Jones said, since “it already proved unsellable to the public. We were exhausting all avenues we had to try to get this done some other way.”
The training center was built in 1973 on about 9.5 acres of city land and since then, the city has put little funding into maintenance, Jones said.
In the 1980s the burn building was condemned from live fire training due to asbestos, which was a realistic training aspect at the time, Jones said, but was later removed.
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In 2019, there was a critical failure of the training tower and by the spring of 2020, it was no longer useable for fire and high-rise operations training.
Currently, the only useable components of the training center are the classroom and the hazardous material rail car prop that was donated by Steel Etc., according to GFFR.
The inability to use the training center has lead to unsafe conditions for training, personnel and apparatus, Jones told commissioners.
They were using the city parking garages for high-rise training, but they had pipes break and the water hookups in there aren’t conducive to fire hose training.
GFFR conducting high rise training [2023]
Lt. Carter Marsh said they can’t do high-rise wet hose evolutions in the parking garages and so they haven’t had that ability for about five years with the loss of the training center tower.
“There’s a big difference in pulling a dry hose and a wet hose that weighs about 100 pounds,” Marsh told The Electric during a Jan. 23 ride along.
That training helps firefighters learn their limitations and have realistic training to prepare for any real world response, he said.
Jones said they’ve had to get creative about training and GFFR training officers have worked to use vacant buildings or those about to be renovated or demolished to facilitate a variety of training, but those resources are limited.
They’ve also had limitations for driver training with asphalt failures at the training center, when a fire engine got stuck in a hole.
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Josh Royan, who was driving Engine 1 out of the downtown station for The Electric’s Jan. 23 ride along, said that it’s challenging to do driver training on winter roads and would be helpful to have a designated, functioning space for all needed firefighter training.
Royan, who’s been with GFFR since 2021, worked as a firefighter in Helena for four years before that and a wildland firefighter previously, said that they have about 20 firefighters with five years or less of experience.
The time, energy and effort it takes to train them on every level is better served by having a dedicated training center that allows them to improve those skills, which translates to real world responses, Royan said.
Pulling and pumping hose in a high-rise structure is more challenging and the general building at the training center is only two-stories and mimics a large residential house at best, he said.
Marsh said they currently have no commercial or multi-family training opportunity without donated structures, which also come with limitations.
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Jake Bloom has been with GFFR for about a year and previously worked in construction.
He said that without the training tower, their training scenarios are limited.
“I don’t have as much experience and haven’t had those types of calls, so to have that training would be great to help me be better prepared and help the team to be an asset rather than a liability,” Bloom said.
“The most glaring problem we have in the foreseeable future,” Jones said during the Jan. 21 work session, is the lack of training facilities to train new firefighters who can’t be put onto fire engines and response calls without fire experience.
Jones said they have no current facilities for live fire, high-rise, fire ground operations, high angle, apparatus or aerial apparatus training, which “keeps us from delivering what’s in our mission statement,” making them heavily dependent on donated structures.
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“The training center is an example of having kicked the can down the road for far too long,” Jones told commissioners.
Jones and GFFR staff have worked to find other funding options for the training center, including the 2023 legislative proposal that wasn’t funded and the partnership with GFCMSU that failed when the bond failed.
The training center didn’t quality for federal COVID relief, Community Development Block Grants, or firefighting grants through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
GFFR did use nearly $5 million in ARPA funds to address fire station infrastructure, but they’re still in need of improvements, he said.
Jones said that an important factor to consider regarding their inability to use the training center is that it will almost definitely cause a drop in the city’s ISO rating, which is what insurance companies use to set property insurance premiums.
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“If we can’t train, we’re gonna lose points,” Jones said. “The chance of us regressing is very high.”
ISO looks at emergency communication, water supply and fire departments.
There’s also a divergence factor and since the city has a robust water supply system but GFFR doesn’t have the resources to meet that supply, the city loses points.
The city has already been rated deficient in deployment analysis, fire stations and fire coverage, as well as personnel.
“We already know we don’t have enough firefighters,” Jones said.
ISO awards up to nine total points for training and is based on having a three or more story training facility on two acres and having live fire capabilities.
The is due for its next ISO audit in 2026 and without a change, the city will be rated “0 or close to a 0 because we don’t have the training grounds,” Jones said.
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The city currently has an ISO rating of 3 and if it regresses to a 4, Jones said someone from ISO finally told him that it was a safe bet insurance premiums would go up 10 percent.
It’s not absolute, he said, since all insurance companies are different, but the 10 percent increase would be an average outcome for the regression.
Jones said without the training center, the city could easily regress without any other changes to scores, “and I can’t guarantee there won’t be changes.”
Jones told commissioners in August 2022 that the city’s ISO rating had dropped, largely due to the fire department’s staffing resources.
To put the rating in layman’s terms, “we got a straight up solid D,” Jones said in 2022.
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During the 2022 commission work session, Jones said that if the city keeps going on the same path, the ISO rating will continue to decline and that will result in increased insurance premiums for residential and commercial property owners.
“Eventually you’re going to call for help and no one is going to be able to come,” Jones said in August 2022. “That’s where we’re headed.”
During that work session, commissioners and staff discussed pursuing a public safety levy to address those needs.
During the Jan. 21 work session, Jones said they were proposing a $2.5 million solution for the training center.
Capt. Maren Reilly, the first female captain in the history of GFFR, has been working on the training center proposal and has gathered bids and quotes, Jones said, which are the basis for their cost estimates.
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Jones said the contingency is high since the facility is still on septic and they don’t know what’s under the ground.
He said they just want to dig out and replace existing asphalt so they don’t get into new requirements.
GFFR is proposing to use non-voted general obligation debt to fund the training center improvements.
The city is allowed a maximum of $3,616,201 principal in non-voted debt, according to the current budget.
It’s allowed a maximum of $680,034 annual debt service.
The current debt service is $86,181 on two fire engines purchased in 2015 and that debt will be retired in February 2026, leaving a current unused debt service capacity of $593,853, according to the current budget.
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Jones said that looking forward, an improved training center could also support training for the Great Falls Police Department and other county and regional law enforcement agencies.
Jones’s proposal includes:
- $553,500 to tear out and replace old asphalt and repair the sidewalk in front of the classroom building
- $65,000 to demolish the existing tower
- $1,212,000 to purchase and install new fire training structures that can be customized to meet GFFR’s needs
- $120,000 to add power, heat and insulation to the two-story general training building, making it functional
- $14,000 for exterior repair and painting the classroom building
- $160,000 to update plumbing and tie into the city sewer system
- $65,000 to develop a master plan for long-term planning for future development of the property
The updated training center would benefit the community by providing enhanced training for fire and police, training with mutual aid partners, increasing their readiness and safety for first responders, and potentially prevent an ISO regression, Jones said.
“I can’t said if we do this, we won’t regress, but I can tell you what will happen if we don’t,” he said. “The safety of our firefighters and ability to train them in a safe environment is crucial.”
Firefighters getting hurt in training or on duty is also a cost to the city.
Melissa Kinzler, city finance director, said that the city could use the state intercap loan program that currently has a 5.75 percent interest rate, which would make the debt payment on $2.5 million about $255,000 annually for 15 years.
The intercap interest rate is reset every February, so that could change, but for the last few years it’s been between 5.75 to 6 percent, she said.
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Kinzler said that if voters would to approve a future public safety levy or bond, those funds could potentially be used to help pay off the training center debt.
Commissioner Rick Tryon asked where the money comes from to make those debt payments, which City Manager Greg Doyon said would be the general fund, made up primarily of property tax revenue.
Doyon said they’re about to start the new budget cycle and labor negotiating process that will come with increased costs.
“Something else is going to have to give is the short answer. What that is I do not know,” Doyon said.
City officials have touted that they have low debt, Doyon said, but the reason for it is the lack of resources to pay debt service.
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Doyon said Jones and GFFR have done the work to try getting other funding sources for the new training facility.
“These critical issues are what end up driving us to make these decisions to begin with when we have nowhere else to go,” Doyon said.
Doyon told commissioners that Jones knows the training center is a deficiency will impact training, and taxpayers in their insurance rates. He said Jones was trying to make commissioners aware of a critical need and that non-voted debt is an option to address it.
He told commissioners they needed to keep it in mind during the budget process in terms of the flexibility they’d have toward other needs.
Doyon said commissioners could go to the voters for a bond to pay for the training center improvements but that they’d want to be careful about the number of times they ask the voters on a public safety issue and a ballot measure would push out construction.
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Tryon asked if they could try asking the Legislature again to fund a regional training center or find other grants.
“We’ve pursued every grant we know,” Jones said. “We wouldn’t be before you here if we hadn’t exhausted everything we know of.”
Jones said that they have the option to choose when in 2026 the ISO audit is conducted, so if GFFR was able to proceed with their training center proposal and they get the work done this summer, that would give them about a year of training done and they could get a better rating.
Otherwise, they’d have to wait another five years for the next ISO audit.
Mayor Cory Reeves said that as a former police officer, he couldn’t imagine having been a cop without their gun range and the fire training center was GFFR’s equivalent.
“We gotta do something,” he said.
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Reilly said they’d identified several companies that make the training structures and once the prep work and asphalt replacement was done, it was doable to have the new structures in place within a few months of purchase.
Commissioner Joe McKenney thanked Jones for brining the issue to their attention and said, “If I was in your shoes, I’d be doing what you’re doing.”
But he didn’t think they’d have much newly taxable revenue to cover the annual debt service and asked where else that funding would come from.
McKenney said that they are “actively, quietly speaking” about another public safety levy in 2026 and though no decisions have been made, there’s a “real possibility we could be looking at another levy in 2026,” so he said that “for at least a couple of months, I’d like to take it under advisement.”
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As for Jones’ prediction that the ISO rating could drop, resulting in higher insurance rates, McKenney said, “I don’t think the community cares.”
He said that issue was raised during the levy with officials saying taxpayers would pay either through the levy or increased insurance rates for the lack of public safety resources and “they decided to pay the insurance.”
Reeves said he also didn’t care about the ISO rating but wanted GFFR to have proper training facilities.
“We need to do the right thing for the right reasons and that’s to protect our fire personnel and get them training,” he said.
Commissioner Shannon Wilson is working toward an EMT certification currently and said she couldn’t imagine not getting training.
“It’s very important to have this right away. We can’t let them not have a place to train,” she said.
Tryon asked what they were being asked to do at this point.
Doyon said it was first for awareness, but also general direction so staff could develop some scenarios and options to present to commissioners to formally decide to move forward.
The consensus among commissioners was for staff to gather the information and bring it back to them at a future meeting.
