Inside Richmond’s Fire Station 66 in the North and East neighborhood, a framed newspaper clipping hangs among dozens of pictures and stories about firefighters of the past.
At first glance, the clipping reads like it was written recently, with a headline stating “No room at the firehouse” to describe the station’s facility woes. It opened in 1942 and is one of the city’s oldest.
Images from the clipping show how little room firefighters had to squeeze between lockers and a parked fire engine and points out that the kitchen door is just a few feet away from where the engine’s exhaust shoots out.
But this article was published 18 years ago in the West County Times. And nothing has changed at Station 66 since then or a number of others that the city says need to be replaced or at least upgraded. Of the department’s seven stations, three were built prior to or around World War II, with some of them meant to be temporary. And the changes aren’t just cosmetic. The upgrades and expansions will allow the department to offer more lifesaving services.
On Nov. 3 Richmond voters will decide on Measure Q, a $120 million bond measure that would increase property taxes temporarily to pay for the work. To pass, the measure needs a two-thirds majority vote.
That West County Times article came long before Marcus Faumui, who was firefighter of the year in 2025, became a Richmond firefighter.
Faumui, who is from Richmond and is president of Richmond Firefighters Local 188, joined RFD in 2017. He said he wanted to become a firefighter after his Richmond home on Second Street and Chanslor Avenue caught on fire in 2009.
“That was the catalyst for me,” Faumui said. “This was always my goal. It was to get here.”
So far, he’s worked at every station. At first, as a young firefighter, he said he didn’t really think about the conditions he and his colleagues worked in. But that has changed over the years.
“Now that I’ve been here for some time, I’m able to really see the impact,” Faumui said.
Firefighters fear their outdated call alarm system won’t alert them to emergencies while they’re asleep and they sleep in communal spaces that look more like office cubicles. Plus, the stations were built long before modern earthquake standards and may not withstand the next big one, officials say.
Fire station repairs are just part of city’s vast infrastructure problems
The fire stations are just a part of the city’s overarching $1.5 billion in unfunded infrastructure needs, and the proposed bond to fix them is among several measures that will potentially impact their pocketbooks.
Richmond voters will also consider whether to renew (at the same rate) West Contra Costa Unified’s Measure T parcel tax and Measure RTM, a regional half-cent sales tax for transit. And so far this year the electorate hasn’t been friendly to spending money: Last spring Contra Costa County voters rejected Measure B, a sales tax, and Measure G, a bond measure for Contra Costa Community College District facilities.
The fire station bond would levy a new property tax based on a home’s assessed value, about $22 per $100,000 of assessed value annually through 2060, and it can be spent only on rebuilding and repairing fire stations.
Richmond Fire Chief Aaron Osorio took Richmondside on a tour of two of the stations in most need of upgrades, Stations 66 and 67, which is on Cutting Boulevard in the city’s southside.
The antique smell of the old brown carpets inside Station 67 hung in the air as we were led upstairs, past a mural dedicated to firefighters long gone, to where those on duty sleep. Their sleeping chambers only have dividers installed by the firefighters for privacy. Station 67 also features a 20th century fire station pole connecting down to the garage.
Osorio said that while Richmond residents and the council support the fire department, figuring out how to fund these improvements is a topic of debate.
“I don’t think anybody’s really come out and said there’s no need. The need is there,” Osorio said. “It’s pretty clear the city has a lot of needs. It’s a matter of just how we fund it.”
Osorio acknowledged he’s in a “weird” position in that he is not legally allowed as a city official to campaign for the ballot measure, explaining that his role is to inform voters about the current state of the stations.
He said if the measure passes every station would benefit in some way.
“It may not all be new, but they’ll at least be renovated or replaced,” Osorio said.
Some of the oldest Richmond firehouses were established during a population boom during World War II.
Both Stations 66 and 67 were built to be temporary firehouses during the war. They were supposed to be torn down after it ended when “everyone left,” he added.
“But nobody left,” Osorio said.
Deficiencies include an unreliable alarm system and cramped quarters
The almost 80-year-old facilities present a number of obstacles in modern times. Their garages are so small that RFD has to get custom-built fire engines so they’ll fit inside. The light-and-bells alarm system that alerts firefighters of a call is outdated.
“When a call comes into the dispatch center they push buttons in the CAD (computer-aided dispatch) and it rings down or alarms the first station that needs to respond,” Osorio said. “This equipment that does that, and a lot of this equipment, we’ve just been patching together over and over and over again.”
Osorio said those outdated systems risk slowing down emergency response times.
“These (alarms) go down a lot, and it could create delays because the crew isn’t getting woken up at night if the lights don’t come on,” he said.
Faumui, who is currently at Station 67, said that it is hard to hear the alarms from their sleeping quarters, forcing them to wake up to periodically check the system.
“I basically have to get up and go downstairs to see what we got going on,” Faumui said. “So it’s not very efficient in that sense because we can’t hear what we’re going to. Sometimes the tones don’t go off, so we don’t even know we got a call and that delays us getting to whoever’s calling us.”
Richmond firefighter Marcus Faumui (at right with his wife Alma Bruno) once won a free trip to Tahiti for being named “the hardest working person in America” in an airline contest. He says he gets up in the middle of the night during shifts to make sure they’re not missing any emergency calls due to poorly functioning equipment at Station 67. — Courtesy of firefighters union Facebook
Firefighters typically work 24-shifts, Osorio said, with about three to four people per shift at a time. On the third morning, the next shift will rotate in, making the already tight living conditions inside Station 66 even tighter, with anywhere from six to eight firefighters packed in during the transition.
“Super tight quarters,” Osorio said while showing Richmondside the station’s kitchen. “They moved all the chairs and everything out of the way, but you can’t even actually seat four people around this table for dinner.”
Osorio said having only one bathroom and shower also doesn’t reflect a “modern” workforce that’s welcoming to different genders but that the firefighters have “made it work.”
“We’re not going to stop responding,” he said. “We adjust.”
But it’s time for the city to take action, he said, especially considering that the buildings came long before today’s earthquake standards.
“We don’t know how they’ll handle a major earthquake. We don’t know how they’ll handle the hills and a wildfire,” Osorio said. “We’re trying to design something that’s going to be resilient and ensure the service, and continuity of service, even if there’s a disaster.”
Richmond has had a plan for how it would modernize its fire stations sitting on the shelf since the late-2000s. At that time the Richmond Redevelopment Agency was initially responsible for upgrading the stations, but it was dissolved in the early-2010s.
For example, part of that plan for Station 66, which was estimated at the time to cost between $9 million and $12 million, now would cost about $30 million today, Osorio said, adding that it might be a good place to start if the bond measure passes.
“Because it’s from 2009 it’s a good launching point but stuff needs to be tweaked,” Osorio said, explaining that building codes and labor costs have increased over the past 17 years.
With just a few weeks to go until the election, Faumui said that the fire union is going all out knocking on doors. They’re finding out that voters, while generally supportive, have questions about the use of the $550 million Chevron settlement.
In July, former City Manager Shasa Curl told the Richmond City Council that, if the bond measure fails, the city would consider using some of that money for the stations. The city has received the first two payments from Chevron, $100 million, but most of those funds remain unspent. But since then, Curl has recommended that the city not earmark the money for any specific uses yet because some of it may end up being spent on the city’s operating deficit.
Two different surveys of Richmond voters, conducted in May and mid-July, showed that when asked to consider just the ballot measure language, 54% of them backed the measure in July, down from 65% in May.
Support increased to a peak of 63% after voters heard the strongest arguments in favor, still short of the two-thirds majority a general obligation bond needs to pass. Only 21% said they would definitely vote yes. The two most persuasive arguments against the bond were affordability and the city’s $550 million Chevron settlement, and 81% of respondents found each convincing.
The polling contractor told the council that this softening of support reflects a statewide trend since the June primary against new taxes.
Faumui said the fire union is planning to meet with voters at places such as neighborhood council meetings and election forums as well as posting on social media.
“Our fire department stations affect the whole community,” Faumui said. “When we get a fire, we respond anywhere.”
This story was updated to correct a photo caption.
