AUBURN – The future looks bright and shiny for EVM Inc.

Bright, shiny and red.

Makers of firetrucks and emergency vehicles, partners Ed Pollard and Chuck DeGrandpre are riding a wave of growth in their 8-year-old company. Since 1996, Emergency Vehicles of Maine Inc. has reported increased sales of 28 percent each year. The growth has prompted the company to move to a new building that will give them five times the space it has now.

“We’ll be doing the same thing, just more of it,” said Pollard.

A ground-breaking for the new $1.4 million building in Lewiston’s Foss Industrial Park is set for Thursday, but the plans for it have been in the works for the last couple of years. The small building that houses EVM now on Broad Street only allows crews to work on four vehicles at a time, with many others stored outside waiting their turn in a bay.

Once the new building is complete, 13 to 14 vehicles can be stored indoors and worked on at any given time. In addition to building firetrucks, the company also refurbishes and upgrades them. It also keeps a fleet of repair trucks that travel to fire departments around New England to repair and perform routine maintenance on fire apparatus – a unique service that helps EVM grow its clientele.

“You mean you’ll come to me and fix my truck?” said Pollard of the typical reaction he gets from fire chiefs. “That was an instant success.”

The company is one of only a handful in New England that make firetrucks and custom emergency vehicles. They’re built from Ferrara parts and range in price and size from $80,000 for a small rescue vehicle to $620,000 for a specialized ladder truck.

Their custom work is an area of real pride for the two owners. Pollard and DeGrandpre are both former fire chiefs, with about 42 years of firefighting experience between them. They understand the needs of a fire department, its apparatus and municipal budget constraints. That’s part of the challenge.

DeGrandpre points with pride to a picture of a new tanker truck recently built for the New Sharon Fire Department. A standard tanker truck is 120 inches high, but this truck had to be housed in an antique fire house with a 100-inch clearance. The solution: Redesign a standard truck with custom tires, chassis and axle alignment that allows it to carry all the necessary equipment on a longer, lower frame that measures 98 inches tall.

“That’s part of our niche. … We’ll build what they want,” said Pollard.

Another part of EVM’s niche is the rising use of industrial composite plastic for firetruck components. A tanker component resting outside one of the bays has a frame that measures between one-half and three-quarters of an inch, with a one-and-one-eighth-inch-thick floor. A truck with plastic components weighs about 2,800 pounds versus a metal version at 6,500 pounds, said DeGrandpre. It has a carrying capacity of 3,000 gallons of water versus the 2,000 gallons of a conventional metal tanker. But that’s not the best feature of the plastic parts.

“There’s no rust or corrosion problem,” said DeGrandpre. The pair are so enthused about the future of plastic components that they offer a lifetime warranty on them, versus 20 years on metal parts.

“Composites are the future of this industry,” said DeGrandpre.

The pair hope to be settled in their new shop by April. Within a year, they expect to hire four more workers to their staff of 16. Ideally they’d like to see the company continue to grow from six or seven vehicles a year to a couple dozen.

“We want to provide good jobs for people, but still stay small enough so that it’s fun to own and operate,” said Pollard, smiling. “Otherwise we’d just sell the business and go lie on a beach somewhere.”