He says unlike the old station, they have a safe place to get geared up to go out on a call.

Fire Station No. 8 is also the first station to be built since Station No. 5 was rebuilt at Northwest 53rd Street and Gore Boulevard in 2004, and it will serve as a prototype for other projects. Billy Trammell of the city's engineering department said many features included in Station No. 8 will also be found in the new public safety facility downtown and the new station that will be constructed to replace the current facility at the Lawton-Fort Sill Regional Airport.

Lawton Fire Chief Dewayne Burk called the station "a new chapter in the history of the Lawton Fire Department."

The recommendation, slated to go to County Board members by the end of the month, proposes a modern, four-bay structure to replace the 1960s-era two-bay facility. The cost – when the need for a temporary facility during construction is factored in – would be in the range of $19 million, well above the $14.1 figure discussed by county officials in the past.

Whether elected officials will go along with the proposal remains to be seen.

“This is a very, very difficult decision for the County Board – a balancing act,” said Christopher Essig, who represents the Emergency Preparedness Advisory Commission on the task force.

In a meeting that stretched three hours rather than its planned two, and exposed frayed nerves on all sides, a majority of task-force members concluded that the benefit of reduced response times in the far northern portions of the county that would accrue by moving the fire station to Old Dominion would be offset by a decline in service times to the Lee Highway corridor.

A draft report, compiled by task force chairman Noah Simon and gone over meticulously by the panel, concludes that the county government “should not focus on producing ‘equal’ service to outlying areas where demand is low at the expense of service in high-demand, heavily-populated areas.”