Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Deltona City Commission held a workshop on June 30, 2025, to receive a presentation from Fire Chief Bill Snyder regarding the future needs of the city's fire stations. The session focused on the Fire Department's Stations Project 2025, covering aging infrastructure, poor station placement, and declining response times. No formal votes were taken during this workshop.
Fire Chief Bill Snyder presented a detailed analysis of the department's operational challenges and a strategic plan for modernization:
Commissioner discussion explored the proposal in depth:
Started with the city work commission workshop for Monday, June thirtieth, twenty twenty-five. If I can please have the city clerk call the role. Present. Present. Commissioner Callwell. Here. Commissioner Howington. Here. Commissioner Lally. Here. Commissioner Santiago. Here. Vice Mayor Harriet? Here. Mayor Miller. Here. If at this time we are going to go ahead and uh stand for the pledge, and I would ask Commissioner Villarasquez to lead us in the pledge, please. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. So the uh him and his wife left over the weekend and uh we hope and wish for his safety and well-being. So Chief Snyder, you're you're up. Thank you for your time. Uh tonight I'm gonna kind of go over a little bit about um some of the uh potential needs of the fire department as far as it goes with uh needs for uh future stations and um the renovation stuff of some of our current stations. So uh to jump right in, uh basically the fire department's looking to update uh or renovate, relocate and build new stations uh to help better serve our community. Uh tonight I'm just here to communicate that need and um and to talk about modernizing and adding new stations uh at a later date. Uh, cost and funding will be discussed at a later meeting. Um, probably when budgets uh being uh done, or as we get a better idea of actual costs of this project. Some of the key factors are that our the age of our fire stations. We got a couple stations that were built in the 70s. Operational efficiency of our stations. Most of them, some of them are undersized or old and outdated and just inefficient. The health and safety of our firefighters. A lot of the modern fire stations today are concerned with the health and safety of firefighters. Cancer is one of the number one killers of firefighters because of the environment that we work in with structure fires and stuff, and modern stations are built with decon areas that when firefighters come back, they can decon and uh clean up without uh de without contaminating the rest of the station or other firefighters that may be there. Um we also need to address response times and our public image. Why to do this now? Uh because of the continued growth of the city, uh it's kind of outpacing the current infrastructure. Uh population growth, uh, the census in 2010 said says that we had just over 85,000 people here in the city of Deltona in 2010, and we're upwards of just over a hundred thousand, and it was either June or July of last year, 2024. Um I picked 2010 because uh 2012 is when we added our last fire station. So it kind of gives you a little reverence to when we added our last station to help with the growth and call load of of the city. Uh also uh the living conditions for our firefighters. Um, there's really a lack of a lack of adequate space in a couple of number a couple of our stations at least for the day-to-day staffing uh that goes on, and I'll talk about that when I talk about the individual stations.