The North Liberty City Council announced plans to demolish rather than renovate the city’s fire department. The station, located on 25 W. Cherry St., is set to be fully demolished instead of receiving the city council’s previously planned $18 million renovation.
In June 2025, the city expanded the fire department’s property by acquiring a house on 240 Main St. The home was located directly behind the department and cost $270,000.
North Liberty Battalion Chief Brian Platz said the fire department is still identifying their space needs. Efforts to relocate the crew to their storage facility at the public works campus, a mile from the fire department’s current site, may begin next year, he said.
“We’ll have to put certain items from the fire station in storage. We’re still in the process of trying to figure out, for instance, where the crew is going to sleep,” he said. “The current crew that’s on duty, we’re looking at options of what that might look like.”
Platz said the biggest issue with the 50-year-old building is safety. The station is in the process of transitioning from a combined volunteer and career department to a full-career station.
He said the building has no sprinkler system, fire detection, alarm, or adequate space for trucks.
“We have people sleeping here at night, having people spend 24-hour shifts here, it’s just not set up or designed for that, and we know that a very quick turnout time is what allows us to be successful when it comes to responding to emergencies,” he said.
In their 2025 year-to-date report, they made a total of 18,885 responses to 911 calls. 80.86 percent of them came from North Liberty, 7.85 percent from Mutual Aid to other fire departments, 6.95 percent, and 4.35 percent from Johnson County’s Penn township and Madison township, respectively.
Nick Bergus, North Liberty community relations director, said the complete demolition is estimated to be 10 percent more than $18 million from renovating alone. He said the North Liberty station was originally built as a city hall and a fire station, but having people live there for 24 hours a day was never ideal.
“We need to deal with turnout gear when coming back from a scene,” he said. “There are often toxic fumes that adhere to turnout gear, and we just don’t have the right sort of storage facilities that we really should have, particularly with people spending nights there.”
Bergus said the start date of the project is still complicated as they focus on relocating, but they expect to start building as soon as possible. The city also wants to add two more full-time firefighters in the summer as they transition to a completely career-based crew.
The station has 14 full-time members on their command staff and 37 half-time and volunteer members.
“We value our volunteers, but it’s really important for us to have folks who are paid to respond from the firehouse,” he said.
Iowa City Fire Department Battalion Chief Tim Recker said space is very important to the operations of all four fire stations in Iowa City. He said in Station One, they have bathrooms, showers, and individual bedrooms for each member when the firefighters sleep in the building overnight.
Recker also said the last large-scale construction done to the Iowa City Fire Department was the opening of Station 4 on 2008 N. Dubuque Road in October 2011, where construction costs totaled $3.2 million.