ZELIENOPLE — Harmony Fire District’s new $7.7 million department house in Zelienople is scheduled to break ground July 1, according to Kevin Behun, the district’s president.

“And we feel very comfortable that it’s 12 months from the time we say ‘go’ that we’ll be able to move in,” Behun said.

For now, the fire district is waiting on the completion of a $1.5 million federal grant application before going out to get bids, but Behun said he believes it is on track for its summer groundbreaking.

Behun said the station — at 13,500 square feet — is seen by the borough as the new centerpiece of the community.

“They said, ‘This is going to be our new anchor,’” Behun explained. “It’s going to be front and center.”

Located at 424 S. Main St., the new station will act as a beacon to potential volunteers and thereby a service to the community, he said.

“Part of having a nice, shiny new facility is a little bit of ‘if you build it, they will come,’” Behun said. “We’ll have a facility that we can get out of quicker; we’ll have a facility that will attract more members to come in.”

In the wake of a statewide decline in volunteerism, Behun said fire departments find themselves competing to attract and retain firefighters on site.

The station is divided equally between a large truck bay and a multiuse living facility, according to Behun.

“We needed something that would be visible in the community, because even though we’ve been volunteer for over 100 years, there are people who move here and live here for years who don’t understand that the department is volunteer,” he explained. “So we designed a new building that will allow people to be in the station, to staff the station daylight and overnight, as much as possible. That will allow people to work from the fire station.”

The station’s living facility will feature several offices with work stations, Behun said, to encourage individuals who can work remotely to volunteer.

This worked out well during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“We had a number of people who were working at the station five days a week and actually had some great response times out the door because we had people that could just move,” he said.

A row of five dorms and a laundry will be built opposite the office spaces.

“We have four closing, private bunk spaces,” Behun said. “Our goal is to have four people at the station all the time. Four people is a driver plus a three-man crew; it can go handle most incidents to get started on whatever it is.”

Volunteers also will be treated to a “massive” kitchen, a 30-person meeting room, a recreation center and a gym, Behun said.

“We have a small gym that’s going to be probably similar to a hotel-size gym, a couple hundred square feet,” Behun said. “We’ll have a couple of machines and free weights, some cardio stuff. If you have a choice to go work out there and respond to a call, let’s go for it.”

Outside the living facility, the station’s truck bay is large enough to comfortably fit six vehicles, Behun said.

“We do have room for four large trucks and two small trucks,” Behun said. “Our current plan is to have two engines, a rescue and a ladder in that station and then two small vehicles, and those bays will pull out of the back into our wraparound driveway.”

The truck bay also will hold work spaces, a decontamination room, gear storage and a training tower.

“We do have the ability to train in this building,” Behun said. “The training tower will have a couple of floors of steps, and it will have the ability to repel in and out of it. We’ll have areas to throw ladders against the building or inside the building.”

This ambitious project has been nearly eight years the making, according to Behun, and he believes the effort was worth it.

“I think it’s a building that a community can be proud of,” Behun said. “We need to have something that makes somebody want to do it. Most boys want to grow up and play with big toys — well, here’s your chance.”

The road to the station’s groundbreaking has been a long and winding one.

“To know where we’re going, I think you need to know where we’re from,” Behun said. “We are the merged department of Harmony Volunteer Fire Company and the Zelienople Local Fire Department. That merged in 2015.”

The Harmony Fire District serves four municipalities within 50 square miles — Zelienople and Harmony boroughs and Jackson and Lancaster townships. The four municipalities came together in 2015 to agree on the merger.

The newly founded Harmony Fire District then settled in the previous Harmony Volunteer Fire Company building at 543 Main St. in Harmony.

“The day we moved in there, we were already too big,” Behun said.

The Harmony station struggles to house fire district vehicles, according to Behun, their gym is squeezed into the unventilated truck bay, and the building’s location proves inconvenient in the growing region.

“Just the other day we had a fire in Timberbrook,” Behun said. “It was six minutes we were waiting for the driver — who lives just a block away from (the new station) — to drive a mile across town.”

Discussions about building a new station began almost immediately after the Harmony Fire District’s founding, Behun said.

“We moved in knowing that this was what had to happen; the four municipalities knew this is what had to happen,” Behun explained. “Now we’re coming up on eight years later that we’re finally ready to do that.”

A building committee was formed in 2015 to research and develop the project, Behun said, and design work began about three years later.

“I’d say we got real serious about this about four or five years ago,” he said. “Then we were at, ‘OK, now it’s time to start putting a pen on paper.’”

In 2021, the fire district chose its site — the former Hockenberger Motors automotive service on South Main Street in Zelienople.

“That’s the site we ultimately landed on, but we reviewed others in the area too — cost, of course, being a huge factor,” Behun said. “We mapped out where our people were, where our calls were and proved that central to Zelienople was our best option for a new station.”

The site for the new fire station, being a retired automotive center, required a phase one and phase two study to prepare it for construction, Behun said. After the site’s cleanup, the existing building was demolished, and the project was well underway.

That is, until rising costs brought it to a standstill.

“We designed this station to be within the budget of what we could afford, and it just got way out of hand because of the inflation changes,” Behun said. “Everyone had agreed that we were on track for what we were building had we not seen those escalations like we never had before.”

The fire district went back to the design, according to Behun, initially looking to lower costs through mostly cosmetic cuts. As prices mounted, though, the proposed cuts became more drastic.

“At one point, we were making physical changes to the structure,” Behun said. “But because we were able to get the (Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program) money and the USDA money, that put us back into the black on the project, and we were able to build the original footprint of what we’re looking at.”

In November 2022, the $7.7 million project received an $811,250 boost from a Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant. Two months later, a federal Community Project Funding Program grant awarded the project another $1.5 million.

“Without those funds, it would have a been a problem,” Behun said. “Now we know we have the station that we feel the community needs, that we know is going to serve long-term for the area.”

While the fire district is still waiting on the federal grant application to be completed, Behun said that he is optimistic the project will go out to bid within the next few months.

“Whenever we do go out to bid the final time, it will be a public notice in the paper,” he said. “And we’ll be ready to go.”

Behun said he is looking forward to sharing the new facility with the community.

“The man-hours that have gone into this have been incredible,” Behun said. “And it’s not lost on us that this building, while the title is going to say it’s ours, it is the residents’ building.”