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"We're going to have adequate space for training, which is something that we've never had," said Andrew Armstrong, the president of the 80-year-old New Milford Ambulance.
Training is currently done in a small meeting room.
Mr. Oxton estimated that the project would cost about $3 million, roughly $700,000 less than had been anticipated as recently as this spring.
As has been the case with other recent building projects, the construction bids have been lower than originally estimated as companies actively seek work in a struggling economy.
Enfield Builders of Enfield, a 36-year-old company, was awarded the construction bid this spring for $2.510 million.
Mr. Armstrong, a longtime civic volunteer and former chairman of the Police Commission, said the facility, which will sit on a nearly 3-acre parcel, would probably open next June.
Mr. Oxton said that in recent years New Milford has received about 1,600 emergency calls annually.
He said building the facility north of Bridge Street "made sense," since the New Milford Ambulance stuck "pins in a map" and discovered that 70 percent of its calls are in the area.
"That was something that was a factor in finding a location," Town Council Vice Chairman Roger Szendy said.
New Milford has more land than any of Connecticut's 169 municipalities.
Mr. Oxton said that a majority of the members of the New Milford Ambulance Corp also live north of Bridge Street.
The responders are called upon at various hours to transport injured persons to the hospital and provide medical services at the scene, sometimes under trying circumstances.
The groundbreaking last Friday marked another step in adding to New Milford's infrastructure.
Work began in April on the realignment of the Grove Street corridor, which should be completed in about two years, and earlier this week voters approved a $30 million bond appropriation, which likely will be revenue-neutral, to renovate the 51-year-old wastewater treatment facility on West Street, a project that will likely be completed in 2012.
Mayor Patricia Murphy said that it helped that members of the ambulance organization and the municipal government served together on the building committee for the ambulance facility.
"It kept both the government officials and the volunteers informed about what was going on," she said of the panel that she served on along with Mr. Oxton, Mr. Armstrong, Tom Bock, Donna Hespe and Bob Dumas from the New Milford Ambulance Corp, as well as Mr. Szendy, and council members Mary Jane Lundgren and Ray O'Brien.
The committee members tossed some ceremonial shovels of dirt during the groundbreaking ceremony.
"With permits, capital costs and bidding, it takes time in the municipal world to get these projects started," Ms. Murphy said regarding some of the bureaucratic obstacles that building projects sometimes encounter.
"This is going to be a big enough facility that they're going to be here for a long time," she said regarding the projected longevity of the building, which will be adjacent to the site of Century Brass, which was one of New Milford's biggest employers before it closed in 1985.
Century Brass was once part of the Scovill Corp, which was chaired by the late Malcolm Baldrige of Woodbury, who later served as Secretary of Commerce under President Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Armstrong, who owns Yankee Supply on Route 7, said in an interview this spring that the project is being financed through a town bond appropriation and that largely through community contributions the ambulance organization would immediately contribute $100,000 toward the project after the construction contracts were signed.
Mr. Oxton said that the ambulance organization could better determine later this year how much money it would be able to contribute toward the construction of the barn over the coming years after it has reviewed its billing of the people that use its services.
"At this point all we can provide are some generic numbers," he said, since the billing only began around the first of the year.
Mr. Oxton told the Town Council in January that the use of billing represented a "culture change" for the ambulance organization. He said that 143 of the 163 ambulance organizations in Connecticut bill for services.
He said at that time the VinTech Management Services of Torrington was providing services weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. because for some years it had become a strain to find an adequate number of volunteers available to handle the calls.
Volunteers still handle the calls during the other 98 hours a week.
Holdsworth Pelton & Associates of East Berlin has handled the billing services.
Mr. Oxton said in response to a question from council member Peter Mullen this winter that although it is a volunteer organization, the ambulance organization was a volunteer group, it would do its best to provide as much funding as possible toward the new ambulance facility.
At the time, Mr. Oxton said that it was estimated that the paid emergency medical technicians would cost $125,000 a year and that the ambulance organization would likely amass $393,000 in revenues.
He said this winter that everyone is billed regardless of the time of day or night and that accommodations are made for people with financial hardships.
