York County saves millions, wins award for repurposing building as fire station

Good morning! York County wins a National Association of Counties innovation award for saving millions with a repurposed building; Grove residents demand respect and a voice from James City County

Jul 25, 2025

pictures of exetrior and interior of York County fire station 7 — York County fire station #7. (Henderson Inc. pictures)

York County won a national award – and saved millions of taxpayer dollars – by renovating an existing building to serve as its newest fire station.

Fire Station number 7 was not originally a fire station. It was converted from a youth home owned by the city of Williamsburg, according to York County officials.

The total cost of renovating the home and adding a prefabricated structure to the building, which was inaugurated two years ago, cost $4.1 million, York Finance Director Theresa S. Owens told us. York also signed a 40-year lease with the city for $200,000, she said.

The last fire station York County built new -- Number 1 -- was completed late in 2019 at a cost of $7.6 million. Those construction costs would be significantly higher today, Owens said.

The National Association of Counties awarded York a 2025 Achievement Award at its national conference in Philadelphia last week for innovation for the fire station project, as well as three other initiatives.

“The interior of the building needed minor changes to utilize the space for fire fighters,” Elizabeth Mertz-Guinn, the county’s public works engineering manager, told us in an email. “The space already came equipped with several bedrooms and several bathrooms. This is the layout that the county is moving towards with all of our fire stations.”

Mertz-Guinn said the largest part of the project was adding a prefabricated building to hold the fire trucks, connected to the existing building by a short hallway.

Besides adding walls to create hallways for more privacy in the bunk rooms, not much additional work needed to be done, Mertz-Guinn said. The building had a commercial kitchen that works well for the firefighters, she added.

“One interesting change to the facility had to do with plumbing,” she said. “All of the hot water valves for the showers used to be controlled from a front desk area. We removed that so that the showers had hot water upon demand.”

picture of Ryan Bonney, Sheree Beaufort, map of former BASF site. — Ryan Bonney and Sheree Beaufort, left, map showing accessible areas on former BASF site.

A group of Grove residents are demanding respect and more of a say for the multiracial community in the southwest corner of James City County.

“People will say, you know, you’re Williamsburg in name only,” said local businessman Ryan Bonney. He and residents Sheree Beauford and Robin Wootton launched a website more than a year ago, Grove Connections, to advocate for Grove and raise its profile with the rest of the county and the city.

They told us Thursday that they feel ignored – or worse – considered inferior by the rest of James City County.

Bonney began an online petition against building any data centers in Grove, saying the county’s focus should turn to rezoning vacant land to allow more affordable housing and retail strips rather than more industry.

Freed slaves settled in Grove after the Civil War. The population expanded after the military took black-owned property to build the Naval Weapons station in Yorktown, and again after the military acquired the land in the town of Magruder to build Camp Peary. Historic Mt. Gilead Baptist Church was eventually resettled in Grove.

Grove has become multi racial over the years, with white families and a growing Hispanic population. Military families rent townhouses in the community. During our tour of Grove Thursday, Bonney pointed out a townhouse next door to his home in the Skiffe’s Creek development listed for $254,000 – about half the price of recent home sales in the rest of the county.

Although exact population numbers are not available, the 2020 Census said the census tract that encompasses Grove had more than 4,000 residents. The tract includes part of the Naval Weapons Station, but it does not include any military housing, according to James City County officials.

“At times, it feels our community is an island, isolated and overlooked by many of Williamsburg and James City County, who often confuse us with Newport News or York County,” the group’s web site states.

“This island feeling is from being locked in from the north on the Busch Gardens bypass, the Naval base, the train tracks, the industrial complex to the south, and of course the James River,” Wootton said on her online blog. “Grove could not really grow much if it wanted to as it currently stands, with land use being earmarked as it is and the geographical constraints.”

Bonney recently attended a James City County board of supervisors meeting to demand more Grove input into future plans for the area, including the new park James City County will build at the site of an old hunt club.

The group believes the county should open up the waterfront land at the north end of the old BASF location to provide another beach for county residents.

“People don't realize that the BASF plant is this county's last opportunity to have water access for the residents of James City County,” Bonney told us. “It's the last possible place.”

Parts of the 620-acre site were contaminated with chemicals, prompting action by the federal and state environmental authorities decades ago.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality determined in 2020 that all known solid waste had been removed, “leaving the majority of the site suitable for residential use.”

Access to the water could be had on the northwestern side of the property, next to Grice Run.