FARMVILLE – Town Council has voted to set aside property for a firefighting training center the Town will make available to serve fire departments across the region.

“We're looking at building a training facility for the fire department. And hopefully it will end up being like a regional training center,” Town Manager Gerald Spates told The Herald following council's closed session during last Tuesday's continued March Town Council meeting.

The property is located near the Town's old landfill site, down from the probation and parole building not far from Piedmont Regional Jail.

“We own the property and the fire department's ours,” Spates explained, “so really it's basically just setting aside the property for the fire department.”

Town officials envision a building that will house classrooms, in addition to firefighting-specific features, such as a smoke room, for effective training based on creating simulated firefighting situations.

Despite the existence of a burn building in Blackstone, Spates said, “I don't think there's any real training facility where you can have classroom training and we plan to open it up as a regional training center so it would serve not just Farmville but all the surrounding counties.”

There are no blueprints yet and the project is currently dependent on winning state grant funds. “We're just in the preliminary stages and we're hoping that we can get a grant through the department of fire programs,” Spates said.

“Well, yeah, that's one of the key things,” Spates said regarding the need to win grant funding. “I don't think we have the money laying around to do it right now with everything else we've done.”

The application for state grant funds must be in Richmond by July 1 and the town manager is optimistic.

“I feel pretty confident we'll qualify for grant funding,” he said. “So I'm hoping if we get funded we can get it under construction next year.”

The main objective Tuesday was to formally set the land aside for the project before proceeding to apply for the state funds to build the firefighting training center.