The Fire Department has a staff of 224 firefighters and an average response time of between three and four minutes. Last year, the department received about 5,000 calls. Evans said this year is on pace to be higher. He said the department has been able to maintain its staff only through temporary fixes.

The department received a two-year, $22 million Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response, or SAFER, grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The grant, which expires in September 2017, is a large supplement to the $18 million the city contributes.

Without that grant, the Fire Department may have to cut 84 firefighters unless other funding makes up the difference. Evans said he’s confident they’ll get the grant again.

Meanwhile, calls continue on a daily basis. On Sept. 12, firefighters responded to back-to-back fires at an apartment complex and in two Dumpsters. Just this week, two reports of hazardous materials had firefighters wearing protective hazmat suits scrambling.

“We’ve had more than usual,” Evans said. “Structure fires, Dumpster fires. … It was a busy summer.”

By national standards, the Pekin Fire Department is overworked and understaffed. It struggles to keep its firefighters trained and fit.

Yet it received high marks in an independent efficiency study commissioned by the City Council.

The department’s challenges “will only increase” in coming years, Chief Kurt Nelson said as he reviewed the study conducted this summer by GovHR USA, which devoted special focus on the functions of the city’s second-largest department.

For that, blame the “Baby Boomers.”

The city’s population born between 1946-64 is getting older and sicker. Much of it is near or below poverty levels. Firefighters are the first to respond to those peoples’ emergency needs, providing basic medical care and preparing them for ambulance transport by Advanced Medical Transport, a private company, when necessary.

The department answers about 14 such calls a day, GovHR USA noted. Last year it conducted 5,226 emergency medical responses — 18 percent more than in 2013.

Those calls comprise about 75 percent of the department’s workload, funded by an annual operating budget of $6.6 million, Nelson said.

“The burden falls on us,” he said, as first responders to medical calls for people who, for reasons mixed into the changing health care landscape that include state agency funding cutbacks, are home rather than in a hospital or long-term care facility “where they often should be.”

The department answers that growing demand with a 52-man staff broken down into 13-man shifts of 24 hours on duty, 48 hours off.

This was the first article to be addressed during the meeting, which was held at the Bernardston Senior Center within the Powers Institute.

Earlier this year, Bernardston resident Frank “Bud” Foster donated a strip of land to the Fire Department to enable the expansion of the department’s facilities. Members of the Selectboard argued that conducting a feasibility study is the next step toward deciding how to use the property.

Selectboard member Robert Raymond explained that the building could expand to the west, east and north, depending on the results of the study. Fire Chief Peter Shedd added that a separate building could be constructed alongside the existing station, or the existing station could be torn down and replaced altogether.

“Right now, we don’t know what the cost of the building would be,” Selectboard Chairman Andrew Girard said. “We don’t know the best way for it to sit on this plot of land.”

Currently, Selectboard member Stanley Garland said, the fire trucks need to be driven out from the station before the firefighters can hold training or even lay out their hoses to dry. The Selectboard expressed its desire to support the firefighters in developing a building that best suits their needs.

“We have 26 young volunteers that are willing to come to your home and put a fire out when you need them,” Raymond said to the residents. “We need to consider how to provide them with a building that will last 30, 35 years.”

The city has 12 fire stations and the response time to reach a fire should be under 4 minutes for at least the first fire truck to arrive up, Penisson said.

On Tuesday, City Council approved spending $7.4 million for a new Fire Station No. 1 near Babe Didrikson Zaharias Park in the city's North End.

Contractors bid last summer to build the new station, but the bids were too high, said City Manager Kyle Hayes.

The city canceled the bids and reviewed its design, cutting $370,000 from the original plan, said Keith Folsom, the city's building facilities superintendent.

The new Station No. 1 will replace the station at 747 College St., which was built in 1981. The 29,000-square-foot building will give firefighters access to major north-south streets like Gulf and Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and the east-west Interstate 10.