New logistics center for Bloomington’s fire department on track for September finish
Bloomington’s new fire logistics and training center on South Walnut Street is expected to finish construction in September and open in November. The $7.95 million facility will consolidate PPE and reserve equipment, expand training capacity and serve as a backup station.
Left: Rendering of the Bloomington Fire Department's new logistics center. Right: Aerial photo of Bloomington fire department logistics facility under construction provided by BFD.
A new logistics and training center for the Bloomington Fire Department, which began construction in early 2025, is slated to finish construction this September, according to a staff report sent to the board of public works ahead of its meeting on Tuesday (June 2).
Deputy Fire Chief Max Litwin attended board’s work session on Monday to get approval for a service agreement to move personal protective equipment (PPE) laundry operations from the existing logistics facility to the new one, when the B Square Bulletin caught up to him for some updates on the new Walnut location.
PPE for firefighters is the protective gear they wear on fire calls, which includes turnout coats and pants, helmets, gloves and designed to protect them from heat, smoke, sharp objects and other hazards.
The board approved the $3,800 service agreement with Laundry Equipment Company LLC to move the fire department’s PPE laundry equipment to the new logistics center as a part of its consent agenda on Tuesday.
“The contract for the construction is scheduled to be completed in September, and then we anticipate taking the next month or so to move our equipment in and get set up. So, we hope to be operational, likely in November, is the goal. You’ll see the building complete here within the next few months,” Litwin said.
The center is under construction on South Walnut Street, on property owned by city of Bloomington utilities (CBU), north of the city’s animal shelter. It will be situated near the department’s existing training tower.
The architect for the project is MartinRiley, Inc., which designed the 18,000-square-foot facility. The Weddle Bros. Building Group was selected as the construction manager in December 2024. The original contract with Weddle Bros. was was $6.5 million.
In May 2025, the board of public works approved an increase to $7.95 million At the May 20, 2025 board of public works meeting, Litwin described the additional cost as stemming from upgrades and requirements imposed by the the city’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), as well as “significant amount” of site work.
The fire department expects the new logistics and training center to improve its service capabilities. For instance, Litwin pointed out that the department has quite a bit of equipment and apparatus right now, but the facility that currently houses them is undersized. The department’s cache of reserve equipment is currently scattered among all the stations, and the BFD also has an enormous amount of PPE and specialized equipment—like the PPE laundry equipment that was on the board of public works agenda. All of these will benefit from the new facility on South Walnut.
“You’ll notice it’s in proximity to our other training equipment ... A lot of our training has a classroom session followed by hands on. Now we can go to this facility, have the classroom session, move over to the hands on portion, that’s literally right right down the property from it,” he said.
“In addition, we often have a recruit academy going, like we do right now, so in the past that’s eaten up all of our training room, but we have a department that also needs training. So, how do we do both those together? This facility will allow for that. We literally have ways to do those trainings in tandem at the same time.”
Litwin also mentioned that this facility will create redundancy and operational flexibility for the department.
“We had a station go down in a flood, so that created a pretty tight window for us to find somewhere else to respond out of. It wasn’t the most ideal. It did work, but we found ourselves quickly without a proper facility to respond out of,” he said. The building taken off line by the Kirkwood flood of 2021 was the downtown station on 4th Street. That building has since undergone a remodel and renovation. The temporary fire station was located at the former Bunger & Robertson building at the corner of 4th Street and College Avenue.
About the new logistics center, Litwin said: “This building is going to be made in a manner that, should we need to, we can use it as a station, so if we were to have a station go down or something were to come up to limit our ability to use one of our current locations, we can put a company down there and house them, and they can respond out of it, just like a regular fire station.”
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