The Syracuse Common Council held a meeting on September 23, 2025, to discuss the critical condition of the Fire Department's maintenance garage at 312 State Fair Boulevard. Chief Mons and his team presented an urgent need for a temporary facility due to an unsafe floor, with the goal of securing a long-term solution. Council members expressed support and committed to expediting necessary legislation.
Joined this morning by my colleagues, uh, Martin Ave, Rashida Cardwell, our President Helen Hudson, myself, and uh Council Manto. Um also here is uh Chief Mons and his team here with us. This morning we are going to talk about the condition of the fire department, our maintenance garage. And here with us, the chief is going to lead us through as to what's going on and the need that need to be addressed with it. All right, good morning. Good morning, council. Good morning, Councilman Juckin, Madame President. Where we're at now, which is an unsafe floor with no inside space for our mechanics to work. And our next steps we're hoping to move to is a solidify a short term when I say short term, a five-year plan at least to relocate into a different facility until we can assess and reconstruct three twelve state for a boulevard where the floor is unsafe. So just a quick history, three twelve state for a boulevard was built in nineteen sixty-nine. It kind of shows the history of the maintenance facility and the size of the fire trucks and how the fire trucks are bigger and they weigh almost two to three times more nowadays than they were back when this facility was built 56 years ago. So basically we've kind of outgrown it capacity wise and and with the uh specs of our apparatus. Um over at our maintenance division, they do a lot of our um, they do all of our fleet uh maintenance. Um they acquire all of our apparatus, they do all the preventive uh maintenance for all of our vehicles. We have over 113 vehicles in our fleet. They also are in charge of um keeping um upkeep of all of our fire stations and all of our fire facilities. So everything they do with our capital plan, most of the money in our capital plan um is uh ran through Chief Zach Smith, who's here with me today. Uh he works with my office to make sure we have the funding to do all that, but it all kind of works out of that 312 State Fair Boulevard. So a lot of things go on over there besides the mechanic work. Ums, you know, everybody knows our our fire trucks, um, their specialized equipment. They have fire pumps, aerial ladder hydraulics, water foam delivery systems, and they need to work flawlessly during an emergency. So getting these things um fixed in a timely manner is important to make sure our spare apparatus along with our frontline apparatus isn't putting um our firefighters or our constituents at risk. So right now we're at a position where we basically have a gun to our head. Um where we're we're not able to fix our apparatus in a safe indoor facility. Um just a history of what happened to the floor. Um the structural concerns started about approximately in September of 20,000, 2024. Um the city engineering department with CNS, they did a facilities assessment and they identified some small cracks in the maintenance garage floor. Then on July 18th, a fire apparatus lift jack broke through that slab, uh, revealing severe structural damage. So at that point, city engineering and CNS to clear the floor unsafe for vehicles, lifts, and any other heavy loads. It also restricted um foot traffic in certain areas of that um floor. Um underneath that floor, there's broken sanitary sewer and oil water separator lines that come from our bathroom and it comes from the floor when um the excess fluids um fall on the floor from the fire trucks. So all that underneath, um, because the floor um became um broken in a in a failed state, um, those particular systems also are in in um bad repair, and we were told we couldn't use the bathrooms and we couldn't use that oil water separator on top of the floor being broken. Um that particular, and um once I get done, I'm gonna give this overview and then Ian Brown and Michael Layman from Assessment, Ian Brown from Engineering can answer all these questions. But the area at 312 State Fair Boulevard, it's already designated as a um DEC superfund location. Um so when this um broken floor um occurred, we uh called the DEC. There was a spill number just in case there was any contaminants that leaked into the soil. So that's underway with the city engineering and CNS. Um I spoke about our operational impacts. Um right now we have a gun to our head basically because we can't operate inside of a maintenance indoor facility. Um right now we're working outside. Um the weather's been great for us, so we've been able to buy a little bit of time doing um the work the mechanics have been doing outside. Um, but with the weather coming, the freezing temperatures and the snow, they no longer are gonna be able to do that. So we're that's why I say we have a gun to our head because we're at a really um tight time crunch to actually find a building to get into. Um right now, um Syracuse University is letting us use one of their garage bays up on Ainsley Drive. It's a small garage bay that doesn't fit our whole apparatus, so it's a really an emergency situation type of situation. So multiple times since this occurred in July, um, we've got down to no spare apparatus. So the worry is we're gonna run out of fire trucks because we can't fix them. Um due to this, we try to find multiple multiple sites. We reach out to multiple places. The only um place we were able to find a temporary spot was Syracuse University.