Murphy – After almost seven and a half years of hesitation and decision reversals, the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners appear to have settled on a new home for Emergency Medical Services Station 1.
The commissioners voted 3-2 on Monday to finalize the acceptance of a $2,452,115 bid from Wells & West Inc. and authorize the construction of the new EMS facility near Peachtree and Jackson streets. The decision survived several last-minute appeals asking the board to reopen the bidding process.
Monday night’s vote is expected to end a process that not only spanned the better part of a decade, but also included past purchases of two other properties that were initially expected to be home to the new facility. Up until the end, the commissioners remained sharply divided over the decision to spend the money on the new facility and whether or not the board had waited far too long – or maybe not quite long enough.
“We have the worst facilities in the state of North Carolina,” Commissioner Gary “Hippie” Westmoreland said during an exchange with an individual in the audience, who interrupted the commissioners’ discussion to ask where the money for the project would come from. When asked why the county’s facilities are so bad, Westmoreland said that question should be directed to Commissioner Cal Stiles.
“Ask Mr. Cal,” Westmoreland said. “Because he’s kicked the can down the road. And kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked.”
“And I’ll go along with him,” the man replied.
“Kicking it?” Westmoreland asked. “Yeah, I figured ya’ll would.”
Westmoreland, Board Chair Dan Eichenbaum and Commissioner Randy Phillips voted in favor of finalizing the decision via a project budget ordinance for the new station, while Stiles and Commissioner Jan Griggs dissented. The commissioners actually accepted Wells & West’s bid during the March 7 meeting.
Cherokee County will pay slightly more than half of the costs of the project – $1.25 million – from its general fund, while the remaining $1.2 million will be supplied from a state capital and infrastructure grant. Eichenbaum said the grant funds will serve as the initial payment on the 6,006-square-foot facility, giving the county 18-24 months to come up with the balance of the money.
“I’m 62 years old, and I can’t ever remember in my lifetime building costs coming down, so we’ve doubled the price on it (by waiting),” Westmoreland said on March 7. “Kicking the can down the road has cost the citizens of Cherokee County $1 million.
“That’s wrong. Our people deserve better than what they’ve got.”
Westmoreland said the county has been searching for a new home for EMS Station 1 for seven years and four months. His comments came in response to Stiles saying he felt “the timing is not exactly right” earlier this month.
Stiles recommended the commissioners consider repackaging construction of a new EMS Station 1 and EMS Station 2 into a larger project to potentially attract additional bidders and create better competition.
“I’m not trying to kick the can down the road,” Stiles said Monday. “I’m not trying to do that. I’m just trying to be somewhat responsible with the money we’re spending. I feel like we’re not being good stewards of our tax dollars to spend this much money at this point in time.”
Wells & West will have more than two years – 800 days, exactly – for final completion of the project. The timeline was extended by 400 days from its original projection in order to save the county $180,000 in costs. Eichenbaum said it will take nine months before the building materials for the project will even be available and received.
“Wells & West was able to reduce their bid by $180,000, which was included for covering for liquidated damages, because they knew with, I guess, the issues with trying to get materials and that sort of thing, that there was no way to meet it within the original time because of supply chain issues,” County Manager Randy Wiggins said.
The $180,000 in savings did not sway Griggs, who had previously said that part of her concerns stemmed from comparing the price tag on EMS Station 1 to the recent construction of a new facility for the Hiwassee Dam Fire Department.
“It was started a year and a half ago, I believe,” Griggs said of the new fire department. “It’s an 80x145, which is 11,600 square feet, and it was completed, turnkey, for $860,000, or $74 a square foot.
“This building is 6,006 square feet, which is coming in at $433 a square foot. I just don’t see that materials have gone up that much, I just don’t see it.”
Eichenbaum circled back to Griggs’ comments Monday, which he described as a “misuse of a comparison of a lot of different items.” He spent a few minutes listing differences between the two facilities, including increased costs in materials, differences in the slope of the ground and the amenities of the buildings.
Griggs said Monday that she had spoken with contractors who expected Wells & West’s bid for EMS Station 1 to come in around $250 per square foot, or $1.5-1.6 million overall. She agreed that the new facility had been put off for too long and needs to be built, but she wanted to see the bidding reopened to see if more contractors would bid on the project.
Wiggins said the construction project at the current site was put out for bid four different times. Wells & West was the sole bidder during the recent round of bidding.
Local contractors Preston Mashburn and Jeff Howard spoke during the public comment portion at the beginning of Monday’s meeting and requested that bidding be reopened. Howard said he had not seen when the job was previously put out for bids, and he is “one of the builders in this area who might take a look at doing this.”
Eichenbaum, however, did not waver from the comments he made earlier this month.
“EMS Station 1 and EMS Station 2 are in absolutely deplorable shape,” he said on March 7. “We are asking high-trained personnel to live and work in Third World-country conditions and then respond to save our lives.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is just not acceptable. Station 1 and Station 2 need to be rebuilt, and here is our way to get started with Station 1.”
EMS Station 1 is in the back of the Cherokee County Annex building downtown. Lt. Brandon Walls said Friday the building’s problems boil down to general livability.
“There are five of us who live here for 24 hours,” Walls said. “You either have to eat at your desk or hold it in your lap.
“If we have any kind of shift training, there’s no real conference area or anything in here to do that. It’s just not as livable of a space as it needs to be for the way it’s utilized.”
Stiles originally recommended the Jackson Street property as the new site for EMS Station 1. The property was deeded to the county by the N.C. Department of Transportation. Westmoreland said the land required almost $800,000 worth of site prep work, a figure Stiles disputed.
The county first planned to house the new EMS Station 1 at 402 Hill St. – a former rescue squad building – but sold that property to Murphy Electric Power Board for $196,801 in August 2017.
During that same 2017 meeting, the commissioners voted 4-1 to pay nearly a half-million dollars for the former Cherokee Well Drilling property on the hill off U.S. 64 West as the second intended site for the station. Eichenbaum and then-commissioner C.B. McKinnon believed that property, which the county still owns, made a good location for the new EMS station due to the space and existing building infrastructure.
McKinnon facilitated the deal to purchase the property from Chris Dickey, his former business partner at Cherokee Well Drilling. Stiles offered the lone dissent during that 2017 vote after fielding community complaints about the site.
“I’m glad we didn’t build out there on the hill,” Stiles said earlier this month. “You can imagine what the traffic issue would be now out on what they refer to as ‘Burger Alley.’ “
Stiles and Westmoreland were on the same side of a 3-2 vote in 2019 to move the future EMS Station 1 to the current property. Eichenbaum, who was one of the two dissenting votes back then, warned that if the commissioners moved the site to Jackson Street, they really would not know how much the project ultimately would cost.
“If you vote for this, you are ignoring what the engineer said and going with guesses and estimates,” Eichenbaum said at the time.