St. Johns County opens Fire Station 21 and a Sheriff’s Office substation at 4630 Melanie Street in Hastings at 9 a.m. on Saturday, at a ceremony the county says is open to the public. It includes remarks, a ceremonial hose uncoupling, a flag raising and tours of the building, according to a media advisory the Office of Public Affairs sent on Friday morning.

The advisory describes the facility as a joint building for St. Johns County Fire Rescue and a Sheriff’s Office substation, serving the Flagler Estates community and the surrounding Hastings area. It gives the building as $4.5 million and 6,092 square feet, with one and a half apparatus bays and room for five full-time Fire Rescue personnel.

Saturday is the second date set for this ceremony. An advisory of Oct. 7, headed Due to Inclement Weather, said the event had been moved from Oct. 10 to Oct. 24. That earlier advisory gives the same cost and the same square footage as Friday’s, and the county has published two other sets of figures for the same building.

A release dated Feb. 6, 2025 says the Board of County Commissioners unanimously authorized the award of the construction contract at its Feb. 4 meeting. That release describes a 6,036-square-foot joint facility and says Vargco LLC will lead construction of the project at a cost of $4,001,674.

A release dated March 28, 2025, written on the groundbreaking, describes the $3.8 million Fire Station 21 and Sheriff’s Office. It says the 6,036 square foot building will provide one and a half apparatus bays and room for four full time personnel, and both 2025 releases say construction was expected to be complete by the end of that year.

The advisory does not say what the $4.5 million figure covers, or whether its scope differs from the $4,001,674 construction contract. On the county’s site search and release feed, both read Saturday morning, nothing was published between March 2025 and this week on the cost or the schedule.

What the county has published about response times

The advisory says the facility is designed to improve emergency response times. The fire chief was quoted saying the same in February 2025, and the board chair in March 2025. The department’s master plan, dated 2020 and linked from its About Fire Rescue page, carries the measurement behind that phrase.

The plan’s travel time section reports that the overall response time performance for St. Johns County Fire Rescue is 10 minutes, 54 seconds, which the plan states is 6 minutes, 54 seconds over the expected performance. The benchmark printed beside that figure is four minutes at the 90 percent fractile, and by incident type the plan gives 10 minutes, 32 seconds for emergency medical incidents and 13 minutes, 21 seconds for fire incidents.

Those figures cover 2017 to 2019 and they are countywide, and the plan carries no response time for Flagler Estates or for Hastings on its own. What Saturday’s station is being measured against, on the documents the county publishes, is a county average that is seven years old at its newest.

The same plan reports that the percentage of 1.5-mile coverage for engine companies is 17.7 percent of the county road network. It also reports that Fire Rescue can assemble three to four firefighters within 7.9 percent of the service area in the requisite time. For a significant portion of the service area, the plan says, the department may encounter difficulty assembling the recommended effective response force within eight minutes for a single-family residential structure fire.

Among its recommendations the plan says the formal adoption of response time standards and targets should be prioritized. That recommendation was made in a 2020 document. The department’s most recent annual report is for 2022, at an address uploaded in November 2023, and it carries none of the words response time, Flagler Estates, Hastings or Station 21.

A $600,000 line and a $4.5 million building

The 2020 master plan reproduces the county’s FY 19 Capital Improvement Plan, and under the heading Buildings it carries a line reading Flagler Estates Sub-station at $600,000, placed in the FY 24-25 column. A footnote to that table records that the project appeared in the FY 19 plan as a Candidate project rather than a funded one.

The plan calls that line a sub-station, while what opens Saturday is a joint Fire Rescue and Sheriff’s Office building, so the two documents do not describe the same scope. Both figures are the county’s own, written six years apart, and the county has published nothing that connects them.

Flagler Estates is named in the same plan among the communities either defined as suburban, urban, or approaching that designation with their current population densities. The nearest existing station in the plan’s own roster of locations is Station 8, at 7985 Morrison Road in Hastings.

The second of four, and the one that is bigger

A county release of March 19, 2026 says Fire Station 22 and a Sheriff’s Operations Center broke ground on March 12 near Silverleaf. The same release says the two are part of a broader public safety initiative to construct four similar combined facilities over the next five years, and that Station 22 is the second facility in that plan.

That building is approximately $13 million and 20,000 square feet, and the release says it will carry a fire engine, tower truck, tanker, rescue unit and a battalion chief. It is to be staffed by approximately 33 firefighters across three shifts, 11 per shift, where Saturday’s building is 6,092 square feet with room for five full-time Fire Rescue personnel.

Fire Rescue’s own station index, read at about 2 a.m. on Saturday, still lists Station 21 on its page as UNDER CONSTRUCTION. The page lists eighteen numbered stations carrying no status label, Station 1 through 12 and Station 14 through 19. Station 21 follows it under construction and Station 22 is marked groundbreaking soon, and no Station 13 or Station 20 appears.

Who is speaking, and the weather at nine

Friday’s advisory lists five scheduled speakers, beginning with Clay Murphy, the board chair and District 3 commissioner, and Dusty Wilson, a Fire Rescue assistant chief. The other three are Russ Martin, the Sheriff’s Office director of patrol and operations, Chris Naff, a Fire Rescue public information officer, and Shirley Lassiter, chair of the Flagler Estates Community Redevelopment Agency.

The Oct. 7 advisory listed five scheduled speakers as well, and three of those names are the same as Friday’s. In place of Wilson and Naff that advisory gave Fire Rescue Chief Sean McGee and Jeremy Robshaw, the department’s chief of administrative services, and neither advisory says anything about the change.

At the March 2025 groundbreaking, according to the county’s release from that day, all five commissioners took part along with Chief McGee, Sheriff Robert Hardwick and the Flagler Estates CRA chair at the time, Talisha Anderson. Krista Joseph was board chair when that release was written, and Passero was the design consultant with Vargco leading construction, which both 2025 releases and Friday’s advisory agree on.

The ceremony is outdoors, and the weather service’s gridpoint forecast for the area was pulled at 2:01 Saturday morning. It has rain showers before 2 p.m. with a 90 percent chance of precipitation, a high near 74 and a north wind of 18 to 26 mph gusting as high as 39. A wind advisory for Northern Inland St. Johns and Southern Inland St. Johns, which is the part of the county Hastings sits in, takes effect at noon, three hours after the ribbon-cutting starts.

The advisory gives the media contact as Jennifer Watkins, a public affairs specialist, and says photos will be provided afterward by the Office of Public Affairs. The ceremony starts at 9 a.m. at 4630 Melanie Street in Hastings, and the county says the public is invited to it.