 The construction of the new Lucas Fire Station is going to provide our firefighters with modern facilities, fantastic equipment and the best that CFA can offer in terms of delivering our services to the community. I am incredibly proud of the hard week that goes into building a fire station and I know our firefighters will be proud to work out of this station. So overall the process of building a fire station will take in the order of 20 to 24 months for the time you take in the initial interpreting the vision or the brief to developing the design before you move into construction and delivering. Some of our biggest stations such as Lucas Fire Station that we have recently completed was four motor room bays and ten bedrooms. So we had some trial and error about where to locate. It was on a corner site where best to enter and exit the station and allow safe egress for our vehicles under a call out procedure. So those are some of the things that we look at in the initial planning phase before we can get to a town planning application. So the basis of developing the design is around the CFA standard design guidelines. These are guidelines that have over the years been adopted and changed to reflect feedback from the stakeholder groups and more importantly they have been built up over a number of years in consultation with our industrial body, UFU. Having established the design we will engage with the stakeholder groups to ensure that the layout of the rooms suits their end needs. We will sit down and discuss with the staff on the station itself to make sure we have the right and final solution. Having selected a preferred builder we will then move into the delivery stage of the project and again the Land and Building Services project management staff will be responsible for the contract administration of the project. Throughout the stage of construction we consult with and liaise with our station staff to ensure that they can monitor the progress because that's the most exciting time for them prior to them moving into the station itself from an operational point of view. At Lucas in particular we had regular visits on our monthly meetings where the station rostered staff would come along walk through the spaces to give them an idea of the feel for the space how they move about the station so they could manage their own expectations when they finally took delivery of the finished product. When we get to the commission handover stages there's a fair amount of consultation with the industrial body to ensure that what we have delivered meets their expectations and indeed meets the overall expectations of their staff. Next stage is the final commission and fit-out and handover stage. Generally this takes some two months before we can get to position where the station becomes operational. There's a lot of detail goes into the fit-out of the station the communications issues that we need to resolve and make sure that everybody is working together. The one bit of advice I'd give for future IOCs who are going through the relocation process is find yourself a leading fire or a station officer who has the desire to be part of the project and get them in nice and early. So Paddy Shawcross who give me a hand with the move here coordinated all the small things that don't get picked up like land-building services or comms or IT or the Lucas Vive station in general but still need to be done. So things like contacting the EMR consumables delivery the linen company, the rubbish bins, the milk orders as well as unpacking all the new equipment that you buy so we've purchased kitchen utensils and plates and pots and pans well somebody has to unpack them out of the box the dishwasher put them into the cupboard before the staff get here so to have somebody a leading fire or a station officer who can jump in and do that time-consuming well it's relatively easy work but if you try to do it yourself in the OIC space it's just impossible to stay on top of your normal business as usual activity, your RDO work any other work that you do is part of your district responsibilities as well as pick up the move for the stations. Ballarat is one of the fastest growing regional communities in Victoria if not Australia I think with the 6th or 7th fastest growing regional community in Australia and that's some data that's come from the age recently we're very fortunate here that we had the foresight of previous leaders in the region and the district to look to the growth that was happening on Western Ballarat, bought different government agencies to the table and had a conversation around how do we deliver essential emergency services across this growing footprint and in the past 6 or 7 years the Western side of Ballarat has grown in population by around about 7,000 and the area that's been opened up for development is already around 60% full so it's continuing to grow and they're already looking to the next place but next door to us we've got the police that have built a police station here and have been operating here for around about 18 months this fire station which has opened here last week but has been operating from a temporary site for almost a year now in the vicinity of where we are now and also there's land set aside next door for ambulance to eventually build an ambulance station there so we're lining up all the different emergency agencies in the one precinct and like I said we've benefited from the foresight of leaders 10 years ago to actually go to government, identify the land and have that set aside when we build a fire station the hardest thing to do is actually identify a site to put the building on so this is about forecasting where the demand is going to be in terms of our service delivery and we know that in the growing population of Ballarat that increasingly we have to substitute our volunteer capacity with increases in the number of career staff we do that in an integrated fashion and we're very deliberate about how we do that but where we are at Lucas there was no existing volunteer fire brigade we sit on the corner of five different fire brigade areas and three different CFA groups so it really was bridging across those different boundaries to identify the need we've already seen that in not quite 12 months this brigade responded to over 350 fire calls from the day they opened they took on the emergency medical response capability and function which has been incredibly important in our community and as the suburbs start to fill in the demand in terms of fire calls and need for our services and the community will only grow The new Lucas fire station is going to provide our firefighters with access to modern facilities, some of the best equipment and of course it's relocated in the right place to really enhance our service delivery across a growing part of Victoria so we are really really proud to have built this station and we know our firefighters are going to be incredibly proud to operate out of this station it's going to allow them to better prepare for emergencies and respond to emergencies