At the City Council meeting last night there was a show and tell on why the County needs the new Fire Board and a fee (tax) to fund it. Okay, well and good; public safety is always a must be it a Police or Fire Department. But, do we have to approach on the basis that another fee (tax) is the only answer?
A few weeks back in a failed attempt to address this through a "letter to the Editor", I suggested we consider consolidating the 10 Volunteer Fire (City) Departments (VFD) into about 4 or 5 Fire Districts. One example of course would be Vienna/ Williamstown due to geographical proximity. This would allow for more and better usage of people, money and equipment in a time of declining membership, funds and aging equipment in the other VFDs. The Vienna Chief cries poor mouth, but it is far and away fatter than the others. For example: the Vienna/ Williamstown (District) would both be deployed at the same time for a fire in these locales. Then IF and I repeat IF more help needed a call out to others Districts. It is pretty much a given throughout the county that a daytime fire is hard to man against due to work requirements and other issues. It would probably be much easier to get say a 10 man deployment out of possibly 45 in a District than out of 27 as Vienna FD currently has? Plus the needed equipment would be more readily available than trying to get the Williamstown's out via a call up later in a fire? Now, let us talk about money. A combined district would of course have the funding being divided by 2 or 3 smaller FD's into one larger pool. This would allow easier purchasing of 1 new pump or ladder or whatever rather than 2. Very possibly it would further reduce any needed fee (tax) that would be wanted by the Fire Board.
And as one would expect, the new fee (tax) is going to be higher than current fee as in Vienna. Now $1.95/ month. New plan is right on a so called fee (tax) of $3.00/ month for the "average" Vienna home.
Now the plan is to collect $1.4 Million in fees (taxes) and distribute $80K to each of the 10 VFDs ($800k). The remaining $600K would be distributed on "need". Already can one begin to smell the stink on this? Plus an admitted need to hire at least one (1) full time Board employee to run the fund. So there goes at least $60K in salary/ benefits if not more of the "extra funds". Now, as an aside the above is the cost to fund a VFD in Wood County? Yet, in Vienna as of 1 July 2015 we will be paying the Fire Chief in Salary and Benefits roughly $100,000/ year. This is a City of 10, 600 people in round numbers and going down all the time. Plus we have 2 other full time employees that are pulling down about another $100K between them.
My thoughts on this are only possibility, not cast in concrete. We need to remain vigilant for Public Safety. BUT, we need to have elected/ appointed Officials at the VFDs/ Cities/ County in gathering in ever more of our dollars without exploring all possible options. At this point one could question only more fees (taxes) for another layer of bureaucracy.
The biggest drawback initially in my mind is going to be EGOs, EGOs and more EGOs. This is food for thought and possible partial options.