WESTON — It’s clear from the first minute of talking with Dave Baty he’s excited about what he does.

Like the fires he fights, the chief of East Umatilla Fire & Rescue District moves with boundless energy as he shows visitors around the agency’s main station in Weston.

“Station” is an ambitious word for the large, red building situated at the end of the town’s Main Street.

The smallest of the three joined sections was built in 1920 as a car dealership, but closely resembles a jail in an old cowboy flick.

Indeed, that’s what the building became in 1949, as well as the town’s fire hall, according to Weston historian Sheldon Delph.

Evidence of the city jail remains and Baty is happy to demonstrate the weight of the iron bars by swinging the single cell door open. Inside is revealed as storage space, just one of the ways the fire chief and his team have tried to make the building work for modern needs.

In the larger engine bays — this part of the building was added in the 1970s, after the city allowed the fire district to use the adjacent hilly chunk of land — Baty points out a system of plastic flaps he designed to keep the exhaust carbon off of crew turnout gear, complete with hand-fashioned wire loops to hang onto hooks to keep each flap open as needed.

What’s really needed, however, is a new station, Baty and others say.

A group, including Umatilla County Commission Chair John Shafer, hope to next month convince Oregon’s state lawmakers of the same, and to foot the bill.

State funding

Oregon funds capital building projects with lottery dollars and, as such, the cost of a new station will not be passed to taxpayers, officials said.

As well, a nearly 4-acre lot sitting at the top of Weston already belongs to the department and has the water, phone and electrical infrastructure in place for a building.

Using public funding wisely and avoiding debt for any future project is a priority for Baty.

“You have to be careful. I see this as this as mom and dad’s money, and we want to build for now and for the future,” he said.

East Umatilla Fire & Rescue District came into being as a single entity last July, when voters in three fire and one ambulance district overwhelmingly approved coming together as one agency.

The move dissolved East Umatilla County Rural Fire Protection District and Helix Rural Fire Protection District, Baty said.

The small towns of Helix and Athena had their own volunteer fire departments when those city councils agreed to join the larger force.

“We basically dated for a while to see if it would be a good fit,” Baty said with a grin. “Everyone saw the value of combined training, maintenance and suppression.”

The service area and responsibilities of the new district are immense. Crews fight fires in a 420-square-mile area, forest flames in the Blue Mountains, wheat fires on the flats and structure blazes everywhere.

“We partner with the Oregon Department of Forestry,” Baty said. “We try to answer their needs and they answer ours.”

His units also respond to motor vehicle crashes around the region, he said.

“Holy smokes, there are a lot of them,” Baty said. “They make me a little nervous, there are more hazards to watch out for, like walking around in freezing rain.”

East Umatilla lends mutual aid to ambulance calls, from Milton-Freewater to the Umatilla Indian Reservation to Helix to just about anywhere within, and even just outside the region, Baty said.

“We’ll provide help anywhere we can,” he said.

The chief said he has a “quiet, inside pride” of what his agency gets done, just like he’s proud of the volunteers who bring a thirst for duty.

That includes training in multiple ways, and there’s not room in the current facility to do some of that as called for in best practices, Weston Mayor Duane Thul said.

“Sometimes they have to block off that street up there to lay out the hoses, and that hill is steep.”

It also gets icy, Commissioner Shafer noted.

“A lot of times the trucks have slid off that road into the railing,” Shafer said. “And that building wasn’t built for the engines we have today.”

Getting it right

Shafer, with a past career in law enforcement, said state lawmakers should be aware of the needs and struggles of the fire and rescue district.

Last summer’s fire season was an exclamation point on the importance of a trained and ready crew, Shafer said.

“The goal is to keep a small fire small, and if you have resources on hand, that’s more likely,” he said.

With recent leaps in the cost of steel, construction estimates for a new station as planned will run about $3 million, the commissioner said.

“We don’t want to shortchange this, we want to factor in all the possible over-costs,” Shafer said.

Baty would like to have overnight quarters for eight to 10 volunteers, enough bathrooms, a kitchen and plenty of room for classes and training exercises.

The district is already appropriately funded, the tax base in small towns being what it is, Baty said. But it’s never going to be enough to build a new fire station, not without taking out loans, he added.

Baty hopes for a chance to get in front of Oregon legislators — in person or through Zoom — when they return to session next month to explain why funding a new and much better facility will make a difference in Eastern Oregon, he said.

“We’ve got to get this right,” he said. “It’s too important not to.”