(KAIR)--The Atchison County Commission has moved forward with plans to build a new facility for the county's EMS service.

Commission Chair Jeff Schuele says the Commission has approved the purchase of property for a new headquarters after they were approached by a realty company about a potential site west of Atchison, though the property does sit on the outside of the city limits of Atchison. Schuele says there was some discussion regarding the purchase during the meeting Tuesday, though he would have preferred to get more input from the public on where they would want to see EMS services located.
 
The purchase was approved with a 2-1 vote, with Schuele casting the lone no vote. He says he has some serious reservations regarding the location of the new facility, mainly on where it is located. He says “our EMS service ran response times from their current facility and compared it to this facility...they ran response time to key areas that they respond to; their big key runs in the city of Atchison; and what they found was, just going normal speed limits, it adds about 1.5 minutes onto key response times to those locations. Which is pretty big in the world of EMS because minutes and seconds matter when you are dealing with the public's lives.”

Schuele says that county staff members are estimating a cost of at least $60,000 to refurbish current buildings on the site for use by the EMS service. Combined with the cost of purchasing the land, the total estimated cost for the project is approximately $205,000.