City Council members have signed off on an $8 million contract to build a replacement mid-Island fire station and emergency operations center.

The approval, on a 4-1 vote, followed a wide-ranging discussion about what the city should be doing to better prepare for a disaster. Richmond-based Alten Construction was the winning bidder.

Once shovels hit dirt, construction of the two facilities, which will sit on a 0.57-acre site at the corner of Grand Street and Buena Vista Avenue, should be completed within 12 months.

"The emergency operations center we have now is inadequate," said Councilman Tony Daysog, who said he was swayed by city staff’s argument that a new facility is needed. "It's not just for the police, it's not just for the fire department. It's for the residents of Alameda."

Councilwoman Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft questioned why city staff transitioned from a single, two-story building with a smaller footprint became two single-story building and also, whether there were other things the city could be doing to be better prepared for a disaster. She ultimately voted in favor of the construction contract.

“I think you’ve made a pretty convincing case,” Councilwoman Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft said.

Vice Mayor Frank Matarrese, who voted against moving forward, said the thousands of new residents expected to live along the Island’s Northern Waterfront in the coming years justify a replacement Fire Station 3. But he questioned whether the city could stand up an emergency operations center in existing space, saying he thought more analysis regarding an emergency operations center was needed.

Councilman Jim Oddie said the city would ultimately need to build the facilities, whether they signed off on them Tuesday or not. He didn’t want to lose the nearly $500,000 the city has already spent on design.

“If we have an emergency, this is where the heart of our operations – this is where they’re going to function,” Oddie said. “Am I going to be the council that says, we’re not going to prepare for this? We’re not going to be ready for this?”

Firefighters occupied Fire Station 3 from the time it opened its doors in 1923 until 2000, after it was condemned as unsafe in an earthquake. They have been renting a home next door since then, at a cost of $40,000 a year. They have said their bigger vehicles don’t fit in the old fire station. When a fire call comes in, the department’s female staffers have to dress on the front lawn of the rental home, city staffers said.

Public Works Director Bob Haun said the city’s current emergency operations center, which is in the basement of Alameda’s 37-year-old police headquarters, isn’t big enough to accommodate the 30 to 35 people who will be coordinating responses there after a disaster hits. And he said there’s no guarantee it would be usable after a major earthquake.

The new center, he said, will be built to withstand a 7.0 magnitude temblor on the Hayward fault, and it will have redundant communications systems to better weather a disaster.

Former City Manager John Russo included the fire station and emergency operations center in 2012’s Measure C sales tax ballot measure, but voters turned the measure down. Still, the city moved forward with a design and approval process, which has taken place over the course of the past few years.

The city ultimately plucked funding from a variety of existing sources to pay part of the cost of the projects, and is seeking a $3 million bank loan for the rest, for a total of $9.3 million.

The contract vote prompted council members to ask city staffers to address a host of other preparedness issues. Mayor Trish Spencer asked city staffers to work toward ensuring the city has an emergency water supply in place before a disaster hits.

Ashcraft said she wants the city to do more disaster training sooner and also, to try to reconnect with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, which offered the city money for a resiliency coordinator that the city ultimately turned down.

Haun outlined the challenges Alameda will face when a big quake hits. Some 8,000 Alamedans will be displaced, he said. None of the Island’s crossings will be usable after a quake; everything we need will have to be brought in by barge.

He said the city is in the midst of a disaster planning effort now.