La Grande is home to the newest building for the region’s firefighting arsenal, the new Northeast?Oregon Interagency Fire Center. Though employees are still moving in and the firefighting storage facility is still being filled, official operations began Monday.

Next year, agencies will combine dispatch centers, moving the one in Pendleton to the new center in La Grande.

The center even has that new building smell.

On Wednesday, the agency opened its doors to media from the region in preparation for fire season, which the Oregon Department of Forestry officially began today.

“Quite frankly I’m just proud as punch to be here in this thing,” said Dave Quinn, fire center manager.

The building houses the dispatch center for agencies with the U.S. Forest Service, ODF and the Bureau of Land Management. It also hosts the La Grande area fire cache, a storage facility to hold all types of equipment needed to fight fire in the region. The grounds also house an air tanker base and two hotshot crews.

The center will continue to combine forces for the region.

For this fire season, there are two dispatches: the one in La Grande and the Pendleton Interagency Center at the forest service building on Southwest Hailey Avenue. Each handles fires on either side of the Blue Mountains. Pendleton dispatches for the Umatilla National Forest and La Grande dispatches for the Wallowa-Whitman National forest.

Next year, those two dispatch centers will combine and the Pendleton dispatch will move into the new building in La Grande. It will dispatch for both the Umatilla and Wallowa-Whitman national forests, as well as ODF’s northeast Oregon district.

The new center will be called the Blue Mountain Interagency Dispatch Center.

So far, Quinn said the transition has been smooth, without any job losses.

The Pendleton center employs four full-time people, said Joani Bosworth, public information officer for the Umatilla National Forest. She said there are also a number of seasonal workers at the Pendleton dispatch center.

Bosworth said she doesn’t believe anyone will lose a job in the transition.

Bosworth said employees are not required to move to La Grande – they can commute if they choose.

Having a new building has been a mission of Quinn’s since he came to La Grande in 1998.

The forest service formerly ran its northeast Oregon center in what once been an old mill building in the north part of Union County. The forest service began leasing it in the mid-1960s, Quinn said. In 1996 it began serving as a tanker and a smokejumper base. That’s when it officially became the Northeast Oregon Interagency Dispatch Center.

“In discussion through the years with the forest service and ODF we decided the best thing was … let’s build a building,” Quinn said.

The new building was built in cooperation with Union County and, like the old center, the forest service is leasing it.