“The new fire station is a replacement for the existing station, which was built by volunteers decades earlier.”

The Jan. 2 event attracted attendance by commissioners and city officials, she said.

Also at the dedication were members of the county department in charge of projects funded by a special purpose local option sales tax.

“The project was budgeted under SPLOST IV in the amount of $2,361,600 and is expected to be ready for use by the end of the month,” Robinson said.

The architect was Bill Howell with Marietta-based Howell Group, who also designed Fire Station No. 9 in Stockbridge, and the contractor was J.R. Bowman Construction of McDonough.

The three new trucks, which were assigned to the Kemper Springs, New Hope and Preston Volunteer Fire Departments, cost a combined $731,435, with $210K of that expected to be refunded to the county through the Rural Fire Truck Acquisition Assistance Program.

"All three of the trucks were the same, with some top-of-the-line equipment," Dudley said. They were purchased from Sunbelt Fire Apparatus. The trucks have 1,000 gallon water tanks.

A training session was held at the DeKalb VFD, where the trucks were delivered, on Jan. 5. The event was conducted by Michael Ted Evans.

"There are some features that are on this truck that wasn't on some of the older ones and we wanted the firefighters to become familiar with them," Dudley said. He said at present that all three of the trucks were in service and one had already responded to a house fire.

"Public safety is my number one priority, and this station opening for 24-hour coverage will enable our combination fire department, which includes career and part-time firefighter/paramedics, to better serve the main population center of our community," Tokar said in a statement.

The Lombard Avenue station, which was built by volunteer firefighters in the 1950s and had "outlived its usefulness," was being used primarily for training and equipment storage until reopening part-time in April 2015 to supplement the department's headquarters on Virginia Avenue in the village's industrial park. That station is open for 24 hours.

Since reopening, the Lombard Avenue station has been staffed 12 hours a day by two or three people who respond to emergencies via ambulance, Fire Chief George Sheets said.

He said it took nearly two years to get the station ready for 24-hour coverage due to a combination of its "total refurbishment" — adding windows and a fire alarm system that meets code — and his desire to evaluate how operations at the reopened station were working.

"We wanted to start out slowly — open up for 12 hours to see how that concept worked," he said. "Now, we're able to open it 24/7, which serves the core population of our community."

Sheets said the ability to deploy an ambulance from the Lombard Avenue station has "worked extremely well," cutting response times by two or more minutes in some cases, which in medical emergencies can be the difference between life and death.

"We're really excited about having this station open because if we got a call in the past over here in this area of the town… the ambulance was coming out of our industrial park," Tokar said. "They would have to cross the Metra tracks at 103rd, and a lot of times the train was there and the ambulance would sit there and wait.

Because a patient's insurance provider reimburses the town whose ambulance service makes the hospital transport, Chicago Ridge was losing out on revenue when another municipality picked up emergency calls in the heavily residential southeastern side of town, Tokar explained.

The Lombard Avenue station does not currently provide a fire response and will remain ambulance-only in the short-term, even after going to 24 hours, Sheets said.

The department does, however, plan to begin running a fire suppression apparatus — it currently has an engine in storage — out of the Lombard Avenue station within the next year, he said.