Goodyear is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, but it needs to build more fire stations, or face soaring response times.
The city hasn’t built a new fire station in almost a decade. It paid about $53,000 for a study that found response times to western and southern portions of Goodyear are between two and six minutes above the fire department’s ultimate goal of five minutes.
The study recommends building two stations to serve those areas, but not opening them until 2022 and 2025.
The timeline sounds long, said City Councilman Bill Stipp.
“To break it down very simply, if we’ve got customers that aren’t being served the way they want to be served, we have to figure out a way to either meet that, or at least have a rational explanation why we’re not going to,” Stipp said.
Stipp, who worked in the fire service and is now an industry consultant, also said he wants to learn more about how the timeline was established, when city the council reviews the study on Monday.
“There’s not a lot of why in the report,” Stipp said. “There’s just a lot of data.”
