The Town of Watertown Fire Department should be in its new fire station on the west side of the town by mid-January.

Construction began in July on the $1,869,941 million project at Route 12F and County Route 202, and is proceeding, said Ralph A. Green Jr., Building Committee co-chairman and first assistant chief.

Nearly all of the steel for the 10,000-square-foot structure is up and should be “weather-tight” by the end of October, Mr. Green said. That’s when work on the fire station’s interior will start

“The weather has really worked in our favor and everything has fallen into place,” Mr. Green said. The project is on schedule and under budget, he said.

The new facility will replace the 25-year-old Fire Station 3 at 20312 Route 3 in front of the Jefferson-Lewis Board of Cooperative Educational Services property. Fire officials have maintained that a larger station is needed because of growing development on that side of town.

The building’s size had to be reduced from a proposed 13,000 square feet because the $2.3 million bid was too high. To reduce costs, the fire station will not have a second story or a multipurpose/training room and will reduce the number of “bunk-in” beds from nine to four. It also includes four bays.

Fire commissioners scrambled to get all of the financing in place, but “everything is going very smoothly,” Mr. Green said. The fire department is using bonding to pay for the project.

Construction should be finished soon after the first of the year, but it will take the fire department a couple of weeks to get furniture and equipment into the new building, Mr. Green said.

The fire station will include a bunk-in program in hopes of attracting Jefferson Community College fire science students and other new volunteers to sleep at the station and go to fires.

The general contractor is Con Tech Building Systems, Gouverneur, which submitted a $1,299,000 bid. The additional $570,941 will pay for contracts for plumbing, $137,000 to Burns Bros., Potsdam; electrical, $172,000 to B&D Enterprises, Castorland; heating, ventilation and air conditioning, $207,241 to Hyde-Stone Mechanical, Watertown, and a contingency account.

Last year, residents approved the project 143-129. Opponents argued that the building was going to cost too much.

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