LAURINBURG — The city could finally be moving forward in the process of building a new North Fire Station.

It’s been more than two years since Hurricane Florence ravaged the area and severely flooded the former fire station. On Tuesday, City Manager Charles Nichols gave an update to the City Council about where the city stands with FEMA in building the new station.

“If you’ll recall we’ve been in the FEMA holding period with the environmental assessment,” Nichols said. “Last month, I think it was Sept. 29, FEMA approved the environmental assessment that they required us to have.”

The environmental assessment was done several months back at the site on Aberdeen Road, which was signed over to the city from the Scotland County Economic Development Cooperation. Since FEMA approved the assessment, there has only been one more hurdle remaining for the city to jump through.

“We had to display it for public comment period for 30 days,” Nichols said. “As of yesterday, we had no public comment period for it, so if we get through that 30 days and there’s nothing that we hear from the public then we’ll have FEMA stamped off, checked off and we can move forward.”

Once approved, the city will have the funds to finally move forward with the project and Nichols added they have already been looking at firms for the building design.

“They did let us start that we could go out for statements of qualifications for architect firms and design firms,” Nichols said. “We did that I think two weeks ago, on Oct. 12, we closed out. We received 12 statements of qualifications — myself, Chief (Jordan) McQueen and Harold Haywood reviewed those 12 and we reduced it down to two.”

Nichols continued by saying they are interviewing the two architects currently so once everything is complete with FEMA the city can just move forward in the process.

“We’re thinking we’ll have about $1.4 million of non-taxpayer and non-city money to go towards that project,” Nichols said. “Once we get there, once we get the architect on board, once we get FEMA behind us at the end of the month, we’ll be bringing some options back to council.”

The city already has money from GoldenLEAF for $1.25 million which was granted to the city last year and the organization has been working with the city.

Reach Katelin Gandee at [email protected]. To support The Laurinburg Exchange, subscribe here: https://www.laurinburgexchange.com/subscribe.