City leaders plan to celebrate their newest public facility today with an open house at the Driver fire station.

The 1,300-square-foot addition to the building on Bennett’s Pasture Road was made to accommodate a new staff of paid firefighters that will remain at the station 24 hours a day.

“Most of the growth has been in the northern end,” Fire Chief Mark Outlaw said recently while visiting the building. “The call volumes have gone up, so that’s why we need to do this.”

The Driver Volunteer Fire Department started 50 years ago with a station in downtown Driver. In 1977, the volunteers raised money to build the new building just outside of town.

Since the beginning, Outlaw said, first Nansemond County and then the city of Suffolk had a paid person in the building.

“We have a great relationship with Driver,” said Outlaw, who began his career at the Driver station.

But with call volumes escalating in the area because of rising population, the city saw a need in recent years to place a paid crew at the Driver station from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. That crew came from the Bridge Road station, making the station that covers the burgeoning North Suffolk area short on staff during the day.

And in the early-morning hours when the Driver volunteers were leaving at 5 or 6 a.m. to go to their full-time jobs, Outlaw said, there was sometimes a gap until the paid crew arrived.

“There’s a two-hour window that could cause some issues,” Outlaw said.

“We’ve never had any,” he added quickly.

In order to staff the station with paid personnel around the clock, the city added sleeping and shower facilities.

“As with most volunteer stations, it’s not built with the amenities of a career station,” Outlaw said.

Among other upgrades during the work were a decontamination room (an Occupational Safety and Health Administration requirement for stations with paid personnel 24 hours a day), full generator power, new paint throughout the building and windows for more natural light in the lounge area.

In addition, the city approved resurfacing of the pavement surrounding the station and leading to the street. The grand total for all the work: $499,000.

The city also hired about a dozen new firefighters and paramedics to staff the station. They started work this week but will soon start the fire academy, which ends in May. Beginning in June, they will be spread throughout the city’s fire stations to allow people with more experience at the Driver station.

The new sleeping facilities consist of seven private rooms with doors, as well as three lockers per room — one for each shift. They allow for more privacy than the old bunkrooms, Outlaw said.

“We have females in the fire service now,” he said, adding that the individual rooms take up about the same amount of space that a large bunkroom would. “At very little cost difference, we’re giving them an enormous amount of privacy.”

The Driver Volunteer Fire Department will continue to maintain office space in the building, run its own equipment and have volunteers at the building, Outlaw said. The volunteers can ride on city equipment if there is space, back up city crews or respond to local incidents when the city crew is at a large incident somewhere else, he said.

“Sometimes change like this is hard to take, but they see the need,” Outlaw said, noting that response times in the city average between five and six minutes. “Travel times is something you can’t reduce unless you build something.”