Camas City Council OKs fire station replacement contract

The Camas City Council has approved a $148,000 contract with Battle Ground-based Johansson Wing Architects that will kickstart the replacement — and possible re-siting — of the Camas-Washougal Fire Department’s Station 41 headquarters.

Consultants from Mackenzie, the consultant group Camas city leaders hired in early 2021 to conduct a capital facilities plan for the Camas-Washougal Fire Department (CWFD) told city officials in October 2021, that the joint fire department needed to replace two fire stations and build a third within the next decade.

The consultants’ 2021 report showed Fire Station 41, currently located next to Camas City Hall in downtown Camas, did not meet the guidelines for “an essential facility,” would not withstand a major earthquake and should be replaced within three years. The report also warned the joint fire department should replace its Washougal fire station by 2028, and build a third fire station in Camas to accommodate population growth by 2031.

CWFD Fire Chief Cliff Free explained during the Camas City Council’s July 17 workshop that replacing Station 41 will eventually require at least 51% voter approval of a bond measure to pay for the station’s rebuilding and possibly relocation. The $148,000 with the Battle Ground-based Johansson Wing Architects, encompasses “the initial efforts to find a suitable site for a new CWFD Station 41 in the city of Camas, including community outreach, preliminary station programming, preliminary site and station design and eventual bond support services.”

Camas City Council members pushed a discussion about the contract to their Aug. 7 workshop after at least one councilor — Jennifer Senescu, who was appointed to her Council seat in February 2023 — said they had concerns about various aspects of the contract, including the public outreach efforts included in the consultants’ list of responsibilities.

Free told city councilors in July that the consultants’ work — which will include the development of two to three “short list” sites that might be suitable for a new Station 41, identifying a preferred site and producing a pros-and-cons list for that preferred site; developing a public outreach plan; hosting in-person and virtual community open houses; coming up with communications materials for social media, the city’s website, fact sheets and mailers to help the community understand the proposed station replacement and preferred site analysis; presenting key findings to city officials; and helping city staff with general support and management through in-person and virtual meetings and check-ins — would be done over the next five months and wrap up by the end of 2023.

“This proposal is … a professional services agreement that will govern the first two phases of this project,” Free told Camas officials during their July 17 Council workshop. “It will be a four-phase project to replace Station 41. The biggest lynchpin in the middle is a publicly supported bond to support that work, but there is work to be done before …. we can go to the public knowing exactly what we need.”

On Monday, Aug. 7, the Council members again discussed the contract during their workshop.

Free said fire department administrators have already done “a lot of work” on the preliminary work needed to eventually bring a Station 41-replacement bond to the voters, but that the department needs to have architectural work done by consultants to help find the best site for the new fire station headquarters.

The work included in the contract with Johansson Wing Architects will give the city the information and cost estimates it needs to be able to approach the public about replacing Station 41 “and say, ‘This is exactly what we plan to do, and this is exactly what it’s going to cost,’” Free said.

Senescu told Free on Monday that she “took the liberty of meeting with commercial real estate brokers” and asked the fire chief why the contract with Johansson Wing Architects included $40,000 for finding a suitable site for the future Station 41.

“Can we use a real estate broker to find what is available and go from there?” Senescu asked.

“Yes,” Free responded, “there is a commercial real estate broker on (the consultants’) team, and that is part of their process.”

“Then why are we spending $40,000 on site location?” Senescu asked. “Is it because they’re also looking at the viability of those sites?”

“Right. They take our building programming and block that out on those existing sites to see if that can fit,” Free responded. “So, all of that goes into that siting and site analysis … all of that is (included) in the $40,000.”

Senescu then questioned the $100 an hour fee for administrative work.

“Is that the standard cost?” Senescu asked. “It seems a little high.”

Free said he had talked to the city’s person who helps put together consultant contracts for various city departments and discovered that $100 an hour is a typical charge for administrative services.

“It is in line with most contract costs,” Free told Senescu.

Councilmember Leslie Lewallen also questioned parts of the contract, including language that said the “printing costs and other reimbursable expenses will be charged at cost plus 10 percent and are estimated to be approximately $3,000.”

Lewallen questioned if Free and the city were “doing the process correctly.”

“We recently finished the biennial budget process and we were told there wasn’t fat to cut,” Lewallen said during the Council’s Aug. 7 workshop, adding that she took issue with the city’s contract with its former interim city administrator, Jeff Swanson, who agreed to work for the city for approximately 25 hours a week at a rate of $200 an hour while city leaders searched for a long-term city administrator.

“One example was a contract we approved before my time as interim city administrator,” Lewallen said Monday. “We were assured that the mayor at the time would be watching that contract like a hawk, and it got up to $615,000.”

Swanson worked for the city from July 9, 2021, through the onboarding of the city’s current city administrator, Doug Quinn, in January 2023, at a rate of $200 an hour, for approximately 25 hours a week. In June 2022, the Camas City Council voted to increase the salary range for a permanent city administrator to $173,000 to $205,000 per year.

“I know you said it’s not an open-ended contract,” Lewallen told Free this week, “but I want to establish trust in this entire process to the citizens. If there’s a problem in the process that deteriorates that trust … that is what I can’t get past at this point.”

Free told Lewallen the CWFD contract with the architectural firm has a “not to exceed” limit of $147,973.

“That is the not-to-exceed amount. … We can’t go past what we think it’s going to cost without going back to you and saying, ‘There’s a problem,’” Free told Lewallen.

The city councilwoman said she still believed “some people are hung up on that” and said she would hesitate to vote “yes” on the contract for that reason.

“I think there are more questions that need to be answered,” Lewallen said. “We have critical (fire station) needs that need to be addressed. I don’t want to see that process thwarted because we didn’t answer every question.”

Councilmember John Nohr, who works as a fire chief in north Clark County, said the contract “looks like a pretty standard contract” and that he had done some homework on citizens’ questions concerning the $100 hourly fee for administrative services and found the rate “was actually the norm.”

City Councilman Don Chaney told Free he appreciated the work the fire chief had done to answer questions about the contract posed by city officials and citizens and said he thought it was time for city officials to move forward with the contract and the process to replace the failing fire station headquarters.

Chaney said his decades spent working as a police chief for the city of Camas and his many years on the city council have shown him that officials can never completely answer 100% of the questions citizens might have about specific contracts or city issues.

“I know the questions will never end,” Chaney said Monday. “It is important for us to decide whether we’re comfortable or not (with the contract) because it will never be perfect. For me, I’m comfortable with what we’ve done … The questions will never end if we don’t make a decision. I think the time is now to move ahead.”

Lewallen disagreed.

“Our goal is to get the fire department what it needs,” Lewallen said. “If moving forward is our goal, that’s what got us in trouble with the pool bond (the city’s $78 million community-aquatics center bond that failed 90-10 during the November 2019 general election). I know there is a vast majority of our citizens who are still livid about that. Anything with the word ‘bond’ in it is going to have negative implications for our citizens. Our goal is to get the fire department actually what they need to save our citizens. That’s the angle I’m coming from. If you don’t learn from history you’re doomed to repeat it.”

Councilwoman Bonnie Carter — who, along with Councilman Chaney and Mayor Steve Hogan, was a member of the Camas City Council during the November 2019 “pool bond” vote — said city officials had learned from that failed bid to build a public community center, two indoor community pools and restore sports fields across the community.

“We did learn a lot from that,” Carters told Lewallen and other Council members Monday. “We didn’t have the appropriate contracts in place to give us the appropriate information. … We learned we need to have experts on board and learn all the details before going out for a bond.”

Carter said the contract CWFD Fire Chief Free had presented to the Council seems to do exactly that.

“So we did learn from that,” Carter said of the ill-fated “pool bond.”

The Council members later voted 5-1 during their regular meeting to approve the fire-services contract, which was part of the Council’s consent agenda. Councilman Tim Hein was absent and Lewallen cast the lone “no” vote.