The Kenton County Fire Chiefs Association shared updates on a future joint training center for the county’s fire departments with the Kenton County mayors meeting this week, providing more insights on the project’s progress.
The project aims to replace the former countywide training center, called the Wietholter Training Center, which was located on Boron Drive in Covington. It closed in the spring of 2022 after Rumpke purchased the property. Rumpke planned to redevelop the land without reconstructing a new fire training facility on the site. Rumpke eventually opened an $8.2 million transfer station off Boron Drive in 2024.
The now-shuttered Wieholter Training Facility opened in 1972. Originally, the facility was available to the Covington Fire Department for use as a fire training center. In 1982, the City of Covington, Kenton County Fiscal Court and Kenton County Fire Chiefs Association reached an agreement to hand over operation of the training center to the fire chief’s association, although the city maintained ownership of the building.
The old center had a robust suite of training facilities, including a smoke building for search training, a high angle ropes course, a live fire training building, a pumper testing pit and other facilities that departments around the county could use to train their people.
“We pushed a lot of firefighters and EMTs through that building over the course of the year,” said Independence Assistant Fire Chief Nick Russell at the mayors meeting on Saturday.
After the land on which the old center sat was sold, Judge/Executive Kris Knochelmann helped negotiate a buyout from the land’s owners for the association’s remaining lease for $1 million. A committee within the Fire Chiefs Association then formed to scout for a new location.
The land they found is located on at 3681 Madison Pike in Edgewood, directly south of the Gateway Community & Technical College Transportation Technology Center. Russell said the three-acre property was the most centrally located property in terms of response times they could find, based on time and mileage comparisons. The land belonged to Greg Fischer of Fischer Homes, and after some talks the association bought the land for about $70,000.
The association has already completed geotechnical boring for the site, and it expects to the overall cost of the construction to end up somewhere between $2.5 million to $3 million. Russell stated that the $1 million the association got from the buyout would go toward the building. Additionally, the association has already earned some grant funding, although the funding is comparatively small and limited for use on specific upgrades. They will likely contract out the dirt and utility work separately as a means of saving money – a design build team would likely subcontract that out, anyway.
The center needs to have, at the very least, Russell said, a live fire training structure, at least two acres of training space and a three-story drill tower. Eventually, the association hopes to begin offer dual-credit opportunities out of the center so that high school students looking to go into public safety can earn college credit before they graduate high school. Boone and Campbell Counties already have similar programs.
The association is currently seeking other ways to fund the center through partnerships with community groups, organizations and businesses, private donations and in-kind (i.e. non-monetary) services and donations from public entities. Asking the cities for money would be the very last thing, Russell said.
“There will be an ask,” said Russell “I don’t know what it is yet because we’d like to see what kind of in-kind services are available to us first before we ask [and] if there’s any other partnerships out there before we ask for money.”
Russell said that the association would need to break ground by the end of this year if they wanted to keep their grant money.
Kenton Hornbeck contributed reporting to this story.