The city will see its first new fire station since the Central Station at Calumet and Conkey was built in 1979 with the announcement Tuesday that a new station to be built in Hessville.
The new station will be built on Parrish Avenue using property the city exchanged with the School City of Hammond seven years ago, Redevelopment Director Phil Taillon said during the Redevelopment Commission meeting.
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When Harding Elementary School, at 165th Street and Parrish Avenue, was built, the city gave the school city property where the current Hessville Fire Station is in exchange for property across the street from the school for a new station.
Property tax caps killed the plan, Taillon said, but expanding the allocation areas, more commonly known as Tax Increment Financing districts, on Kennedy and Calumet avenues around the Borman Expressway resurrected it.
According to the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance website, a TIF district captures increases in taxable assessed value in an allocation area and the revenue generated from that is used to finance public improvements.
A fire station falls under a qualified use of allocation monies, Dan Botich, of the municipal accounting firm Cender & Co., told the commission.
“As assessed value is captured, it funds projects in the allocation area. Public use addresses and benefits the area,” he said.
The new Fire Station No. 8 would be between 12,000 and 12,500 square feet and house up to 10 firefighters per shift, Hammond Fire Chief Jeff Smith said. It’ll also house an aerial vehicle as well as two engines and two ambulances, of which one engine and one ambulance will be “spares.”
Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said the project, along with the commission’s passing the ThruPoint Intermodal facility, made Tuesday “a good day for Hessville.”
“There’s a lot of new development in place, and expanding the (tax-increment financing) district helped build it,” McDermott said.
The commission is expected to approve the gateway allocation expansion at its June meeting.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter.