Smokey Bear will stick to the main drag in Oconto Falls, but the ranger station he represents will move a few blocks away.
That’s the vision proposed by representatives of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, who want to purchase land in the Oconto Falls industrial park to upgrade and enlarge the ranger station.
The Oconto Falls City Council last week approved the DNR’s offer of $15,960 to purchase a 4.56-acre parcel on Hank Marks Drive, next to Luiser Well Drilling.
“It was my goal to find a spot close to the present one. People know where we’re at,” said Tim Mella, one of three DNR representatives to attend the meeting Aug. 13.
He said the current station’s 1-acre lot is not large enough to accommodate the new building, and attempts to purchase additional land adjacent to it were unsuccessful.
According to Mella, the ranger station at 195 E. Highland Drive will be sold after the new building is constructed. The 50- by-50-foot station built in 1978 has “outlived its usefulness,” Mella said, and a 60-by-130-foot facility will replace it.
The new facility will be located within blocks of the current one, but will no longer be visible from Highland Drive, a main route through the city, leaving Smokey Bear with little exposure. A sign outside the ranger station features an image of Smokey, along with a changeable block to indicate the level of fire danger: low, moderate or high.
According to the agreement approved by the City Council, the sign will move across the street, near the intersection of East Highland Drive and Locust Avenue.
“Because Highland is such a traveled route, we wanted to have something to show that prevention and fire danger sign,” said John Lubbers, Green Bay forestry team leader for the DNR.
“We’d certainly like to maintain a sign on that road,” Mella said.
The new facility will include office and storage space and will be a vast improvement over the 1978 building, which has numerous structural problems, the DNR officials said. Construction is scheduled to begin in spring.
The ranger station serves the county in two ways: fire response and forest management. The Oconto Falls Fire Response Unit covers 15 townships in central and southern Oconto County, and Lubbers said rangers respond to a couple dozen calls a year.
A team of three foresters and warden Mike Stahl use the facility as a base and training station.
The proposed building will have a drive-through vehicle storage garage with four bays for fire control and forestry vehicles, a shop area for light equipment and vehicle maintenance, and space for employee restrooms and lockers. The heated bays will allow the staff to respond to a forest fire quicker because equipment will be fully loaded and operational at all times, which is not the case now.
“The new building will just fit our needs a whole lot more,” Mella said.
The building design allows for expansion on both sides of the facility, if needed in the future.
“It sounds like a good fit for Oconto Falls. It’s a good project,” Alderman Don Osborne said.
Aldermen Mathew McDermid and Kevin Rusch asked about the possibility of railroad spur on the property. The lot is T-shaped, and the railroad spur would run along the back of the lot, at the top of the T.
“I don’t see that as a problem, but we may want to rotate our building 90 degrees, in case something like that narrows the lot,” Mella said.
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