At a recent town hall meeting, Habersham County Commissioner Bruce Palmer brought forward several challenges and new developments in public safety around the county. Those topics ranged from cows wandering into roadways to funding for public safety, but many of the developments in Habersham’s public safety centered around the county’s new emergency services station.
The project was proposed in 2019 in the county’s possible SPLOST projects. The SPLOST was passed overwhelmingly, and the new emergency services station is estimated to cost around $4 million in SPLOST funds.
The “central station” will include housing for firefighters, a hub for Habersham County Fire and Emergency Services, as well as a new location for the county’s E-911 services— but this new station isn’t just an improvement for HCES and E-911’s facilities, it could be the means to putting an end to HCES’s understaffing.
The need for a central station
The county’s emergency services are spaced out across the county, but there isn’t a location with immediate access to GA-365 and better positioning to reach different areas of the county. This Demorest location would change that.
“That’s going to be put in the center of the county where it’s needed,” Habersham County Emergency Services Director Chad Black tells Now Habersham. “It’s going to put us where we can deploy more personnel from a central location and from there, going north, south, east and west is going to be much faster.”
The new location won’t just serve the county’s fire department and emergency services to improve their response times, it will also give the county’s E-911 dispatching services a better environment to work in.
Chairman Palmer says the current E-911 facility is “like a dungeon.” The building is underground with no windows and only one door. The only other point of exit in the building is an escape hatch. He believes this new location will better serve the staff, who often work 12-hour-long shifts in a dark room with no way to see outside.
365 and school traffic
The central station will be located on Demorest Mt. Airy Highway, across from Wilbanks Middle School, next to Demorest Elementary in the area that used to be their soccer field; the area was abandoned and is now overgrown. The county purchased the land from the Habersham County Board of Education for $252,264.
The central location will give the county’s emergency services direct access to GA-365. But with school traffic coming from both sides of the highway and after-school traffic on 365, there may be some concerns with getting emergency vehicles out of the new station.
Black assures citizens that the county and emergency services studied the traffic on the highway before and after school to determine how the school traffic would impact emergency services vehicles getting in and out of the station, and determined that the location was the right fit.
“We will have an exit for emergency vehicles only that will come out onto Demorest-Mt. Airy Highway in front of the station,” Black said. “Between our emergency warning systems and the officers directing traffic, we don’t see any problem with it.”
He says the school traffic does exist there, but due to their working relationship with school resource officers and infrastructure, even if a call comes in during school traffic, they’ll have a way around it.
“There will be times we run calls during that [school traffic], but it’s not going to be any problem,” Black said.
Interim County Manager Alicia Vaughn says that during the planning of the building and site, she plans to work with the developer to make sure all infrastructure needs are met to keep both students, their families and first responders safe.
“We’ll do whatever improvements to the infrastructure need to be done to make sure it is safe,” Vaughn said.
“Growing our own”
The county’s emergency services are understaffed right now, and it would require 12 new staff members to join HCES to fully staff the new station. But Black says that’s an issue they’re working to fix.
RELATED: Public safety officials respond to concerns about emergency response times
“Right now, it’s hard to find people that are qualified [to work for HCES],” Black says.
The department is hoping to offer in-house training with the addition of a new station. This would give HCES the opportunity to train and certify EMTs and paramedics in Habersham, as well as offer that training to other cities and counties.
They are also looking at offering fire services classes to the curriculum at Habersham Central High School. This curriculum would allow students to train as firefighters and graduate high school with the skillset to get a job in the county’s fire services, improving their staffing as well as giving recent graduates more opportunities.
When those new staff members come on board, from both on-site and student training, grant funding would be available to cover their gear for their first three years of service through the Safer Grant, according to Black.
Black says offering these training opportunities is “growing our own” emergency services workforce in Habersham County. Professionals that are already trained as firefighters, EMTs and paramedics already have departments they work with, and likely aren’t planning to leave, according to Black. He believes giving local citizens the opportunity to train and join the force is the way to grow their staff to the size they need.
“If we start growing our own and training them as an EMT, firefighter and medic, and they sign contracts that they have to work here for an extended period of time or they have to pay the county back, that’s going to help,” Black says.
