``There is no immediate reason for them to move out,'' said Robert McLeod, VOSHA director. He said closing the fire station, which will be abandoned next year when construction of the city's new public safety building is finished, was never a consideration.
City officials have appealed the fines, which include other minor violations for a total of $23,550.
Some members of the City Council - including one who has since resigned to take a job with the fire department - had suggested the fire station should be vacated.
Months before stepping down from his Ward 1 council seat, John Hannigan urged city officials to start looking for alternate housing for firefighters based on violations that had been identified at that point, but not formally put in writing.
All but one of those violations were detected during an inspection of the fire station in April and have already been corrected, according to McLeod, who said the most serious problem wasn't even a result of that inspection.
According to McLeod, the structural situation would have gone unnoticed if city firefighters who were lobbying for a new facility hadn't brought it up. VOSHA was preparing to conclude its review of the fire station - giving it a near-clean bill of health - when firefighters provided state officials with a three-year-old engineering report that raised questions about the building's structural integrity.
City officials used the report to persuade voters to approve funding for the new public safety building that is now under construction on the north end of the city.
McLeod described the city's failure to act on its findings as a ``willful violation'' of the Occupational Safety and Health Act. That violation alone accounts for $21,000 of the $23,550 total fines that have been proposed.
