"They've outgrown our usefulness for our department," said Chief Robert Stoker with St. George Fire Department. That’s why the city has four apparatuses on order, the first truck is a ladder, used in aerial assaults on fires and the other three trucks are engines, used to pump water from hydrants.

"The last twenty years or so we've taken on a lot of different disciplines, such as hazardous materials response, medical response, traffic accidents," Stoker said. The new vehicles will have 40 percent more space than the older engines in the fleet.

The ladder reaches 125 feet, or about 12 stories. Sharonville has two 13-story buildings, the Ramada Plaza and Clarion Hotel, as well as the 12-story Spectrum Office Tower.

The new truck will replace a 20-year-old fire truck with a bucket and 95-foot reach. The older vehicle is for sale.

The 125-foot fire truck was custom made in Nebraska. With a $1.2 million price tag, the project took 18 months to complete.

The changes proposed will mean greater safety for the all-volunteer firefighters, said James White, a commissioner of the McKownville Fire District. Now, he said, the fire trucks vie for space with the firefighters’ personal-equipment lockers. “We’ve had trucks back into the lockers,” he said. “It’s a situation we feel we have to change.”

Eight fire departments provide coverage for the town of Guilderland; five of them, including McKownville, serve districts that lie entirely within the town. The McKownville, Westmere, and Guilderland firehouses are on Route 20, located within a four-and-a-half mile stretch. The combined budget for the fire departments serving Guilderland, a town with about 35,000 residents, totals about $3 million annually.

The building has gone through multiple makeovers but has now gotten to the point where it no longer meets the needs of a modern fire station, the five commissioners wrote in a letter to fire-district residents. More space is needed to meet the expanded federal and state requirements for firefighting equipment, and the building’s footprint cannot be substantially enlarged, they wrote.

White said that a bond provider has not yet been secured, but the $3,231,000 figure is “what we hope to get.”

The existing firehouse is 6,338 square feet.