Donated Land Likely Site For New Fire Station In/Around: Liberty Lake

A site has been tentatively picked for Valley Fire District’s new Liberty Lake station.

Elmer Schneidmiller, a longtime Liberty Lake landowner and resident, has offered to donate land near Mission and Molter.

“I’m pretty confident,” said Valley Fire Chief Pat Humphries. “This land fits our needs. We’re going to present (Schneidmiller) with a possible agreement to review.”

“We have an agreement in principle, but we have to cover it in writing,” Paul J. Allison, attorney for Valley Fire, said Wednesday. “I expect it to be resolved in the next few days.”

The parcel, which is just west of Molter on the south side of Mission, is just under an acre in size, Allison said.

It is worth about $20,000, said Schneidmiller, who added that he would donate “whatever it takes” to get the community its much needed station.

“We need a fire station out here,” Schneidmiller said. “There’s a lot of houses out here and we’re getting a lot of industry, and industry is the most concerned.”

The station will cost about $750,000 to build and will house one engine company - or three firefighters - at a time, Humphries said. The engine also will carry an automatic heart defibrillator.

Until now, the lakeside community has been served by Valley Fire’s Station No. 3 in Greenacres. That station, on the corner of Appleway and Michigan, is about 2 1/2 miles from the proposed site of the new Liberty Lake station.

Response time from Station No. 3 varies from seven to nine minutes to the north side of the lake to up to 16 minutes to the southeast side, said Assistant Chief Karl Bold.

That’s well off the district’s goal of four minutes for medical calls and under five minutes for a fire, Humphries said.

The new station will improve the district’s response time to Liberty Lake, said Rick Keeling, captain of Station No. 3, but some areas still will be hard to reach, he said.

“Some of those streets are so narrow and twisty, they’ll never get the five-minute response time,” he said.

Secondary response for the Liberty Lake area is provided by Station No. 4 on East Wellesley in Otis Orchards, about a quarter-mile east of Harvard. That station is about 3 miles from the site proposed for the new station.

The district plans to begin building in summer of 1996, Humphries said.