ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a series of stories regarding the May 19 joint meeting between the Liberal City Commission and Seward County Commission to discuss the county’s intention to vacate the 15th Street fire station to relocate to a separate facility on 18th Street. Today’s story tells how the station came to be and the growth of both the Liberal Fire Department and the Seward County Fire Department. Future stories will talk about feedback from commissioners and city and county staff as well as an offer from the city commission to buy out the county’s portion.
When the current Walgreens store in Liberal was built at the corner of 15th Street and Kansas Avenue, the former Liberal Fire Department building was demolished, and a new home for the department was constructed close to the store.
At the time of its construction, the new 15th Street fire station also housed the Seward County Fire Department, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, county officials moved the SCFD out of the building for safety reasons.
The county still houses some of their equipment in the 15th Street station and pays the city for 40 percent of the utility and insurance costs. Now, the county is looking to take its equipment from the building and discontinue paying those costs, and the City of Liberal is looking to provide additional cash to the county to help accommodate the move.
The Liberal City Commission and Seward County Commission met Monday in a special joint meeting to begin possible negotiations for an offer on the county’s portion of the building.
Liberal Fire Chief Kelly Kirk, who began working as a firefighter in 1990 as a volunteer with SCFD, said the city’s fire department has had a few locations in its time.
“My understanding was prior to 1982, the city fire station used to be across the street from where the Municipal Court is now, and they operated out of there,” he said. “There was a fire station at Lincoln and Walnut in the city, and also, there was an airport station built to house the airport truck. That was the city’s operation.”
It was around the time Kirk began his firefighting career when city officials started pursuing a station at 15th and Kansas, which at the time was close to the north end of town.
Kirk said then LFD Chief Milton Rice and SCFD Chief Brady Reinhardt had conversations, with considerations of moving the departments together in the former 15th and Kansas station.
“To the best of my recollection, that station cost around $500,000,” Kirk said. “I think the bid they accepted was $442,000. It was going to be a joint effort with the county putting in a percentage.”
Kirk said the county at that time presented a check to the city for $80,000, and this is how the former 15th and Kansas station came to be. In 2006, then City Manager Toby Miller announced he reached an agreement with Walgreens to purchase the property where the store now sits.
“We were told we would need to vacate out of there by August of 2006,” Kirk said. “There were a lot of meetings I wasn’t a part of. A committee from the city and a committee from the county went together and planned the fire station as it sits at 15th and Grant now.”
Kirk said there were many locations considered for the new fire station, including the location where the National Beef Sports Complex now resides in east Liberal.
“We found out that was very much in a flood zone and would have to be built up a long way,” Kirk said.
After LFD vacated the former station, that building was torn down to make room for Walgreens.
“The county originally had one drive-thru bay, two bay spaces, and the basement was the fire chief’s office, the mechanical room and a large open area that was a meeting room or training room where the copier was,” Kirk said. “From the time I started with the city in 1991, the city had everything upstairs. The county had the basement and the drive-thru bays, and things ebbed and flowed and grew and shrank.”
Plans for the new 15th Street, Kirk said, called for the city to provide the county with all the square footage in bay and office space they had in the old station at no cost to the county.
“Anything that was added into the new station was over and above what currently existed for the county to occupy, the county would pay for that,” he said. “The city did plan to build in what the county already occupied, and the county had the opportunity to add additional space.”
LFD moved into the new station in late 2008 and has operated there since then. Both LFD and SCFD, however, Kirk said, look very different today.
“For the city, one of the biggest factors that affected us when we moved out of the old north station in 2006, we were a fire chief, a deputy chief and four firefighters,” he said. “That’s all we had.”
Kirk said Federal Aviation Administration mandates have also changed the amount of passengers on a flight before it qualifies as standby.
“As a city fire department, the only thing we are statutorily required to do by federal mandate is to provide protection at that airport,” he said.
Kirk said former LFD Chief Jim Fisher and then-City Clerk Debbie Giskie petitioned the FAA to give the city a two-year exemption.
“What that did was it bought us two years to upgrade our staffing by one additional person per shift in 2007, one additional person per shift in 2008 for the purpose of staffing the airport station at Station Three,” Kirk said.
At the time LFD moved into the new station, Kirk said the department had a chief, deputy chief, fire marshal and six firefighters per shift, up from the previous number of four.
“We were nine per day instead of six,” he said. “We were a lot bigger in the time between 2020 and 2025. We’ve had some retirements, and I seized that as an opportunity to change the department to become more efficient as well. The way the city fire department operates today in that station, there’s my office, my deputy chief’s office, and we have taken our three shift captains and promoted them to battalion chiefs and put them on day schedules.”
Kirk said this included promotion of LFD lieutenants to captain and three firefighters to lieutenant, and he is currently in the process of staffing each shift at six firefighters.
“We’ve actually got 18 shift firefighters and five administrative personnel,” he said. “We are close to triple what we were when we moved out of the old north station in 2006. The operations have changed, and to put both fire departments back in that box, it can be done, but it will not be done without some changes and some expansion.”
SCFD Chief Andrew Barkley came on board with the department in 2015, and at that time, he said the department was completely paid call staff, with a fire chief, assistant fire chief and a full-time lieutenant firefighter, who also served as an assistant emergency manager.
“We sat for a year and realized we had some issues with staffing and the way we needed to do things,” he said. “We worked diligently over the next several years to add daytime staffing to our county. Currently, we’re sitting at a shift of five daytime firefighters supplemented by five paid call firefighters, myself and my deputy chief. Our operation has grown as well.”
Barkley said the county’s fire department will hopefully continue to grow to continue providing service to the county. He added the county’s coverage area is quite different than that of the city.
“We’re covering 642 square miles outside the city, and there’s 40,000 acres of wildland we have to protect, so we’re growing as well,” he said. “Our equipment’s changed. Our fleet has changed. You could put us back together, but I don’t know how well that’s going to work. We’re both growing, and we both serve the same purpose. He’s protecting the city of Liberal, but he’s also my second response team for me. We work the same with him.”
