Otsego city commissioners heard what it would cost if the Otsego Fire Department shifted from a paid on call model to having a few full-time firefighters.
Fire chief Brandon Weber gave a report to the city commission Monday, Oct. 16, on several options and their costs to the city and Otsego Township, which jointly fund the department.
Mayor Cyndi Trobeck said, “We are in the middle of our fiscal year and are sans manager, but it isn’t in our best interest to wait until the new manager is hired to get information and discuss this.”
Weber has told both governments that over 800 calls in a year would be answered by fire fighters—driven by a large and growing number of medical calls—and that meant the department must change its approach.
Paid on call fire fighters burn out at that pace, Weber said, leading to the department having trouble retaining people and keeping its strength up.
Three options
The options presented include either adding full time personnel who can handle more of the day-to-day work of the department and answer medical calls or discontinuing offering medical first response. The department’s volunteer members would still be called for most fires and for larger incidents or as backup to the full-time members.
The first option would involve hiring three full-time fire fighters who would man the station in turn in 24-hour shifts, which Weber said is common among fire and EMS services. He estimated that would take about 457 of the calls out of the equation for the paid on call fire fighters.
“That would be what I’d do if you told me cost was no object,” Weber said.
Option two would hire two full-time fire fighters who would work 12-hour shifts from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Weber estimated that would handle about 312 calls on the year.
Option three would be to hire one full-time firefighter who’d work Mondays through Fridays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. That fire fighter would handle an estimated 192 calls.
“That would still leave a very challenging number for the rest of the department,” Weber said.
The estimated cost of employing a fire fighter would be $64,943 Weber said, with a $194,000 price tag for the three full-time option.
Commissioner Jim Misner asked if there would be a way to do it cheaper using, for example, six part-time fire fighters rather than three full time ones. Weber said he hadn’t considered that option.
Offsets
He also told the commission there were some areas where he believed the city would save money by having a full-time person, including not paying the paid on call wages for the calls the full-time people were taking and giving the full-time person various station and equipment maintenance jobs.
Weber said the city and township could also increase efforts toward cost recovery from insurance companies and offset some of the cost of the calls. The city currently does more of that than the township, he said.
An egregious example he believes should be looked at was medical alert companies.
“These have been a nuisance for years and it’s getting worse,” Weber said. “The majority of these are false. I see what I see as predatory marketing by the alarm companies.”
City commissioner Stacey Withee said she’d had experience with her mother’s medical alert device and it was easy to set off accidentally.
“I’ve done it so many times by bumping it against something when I’m helping her or dropping it one the ground,” Withee said.
But the company would call to check with her mother to see if there was a real medical emergency.
Weber said there were different companies and they all did not do that.
“Some companies are good, but some just call us blindly,” he said. “We’re glad people use the service when it’s a real emergency, but we’d just like not to get called out when the cat is playing with the alarm hanging from the chain.”
Several fire fighters in the audience spoke up to testify that this did indeed happen and claimed it was most often in the middle of the night.
By Weber’s estimates, those would amount to about $75,550 per year in offsets.
Discussion
Weber said that having a full-time core responding to calls would also allow him to expand the area where fire fighters could live in the township because response times for medical calls would be less important.
Weber thanked police Chief (and interim city co-manager) Gordon Konkle for allowing him to use downtime when he’s working as a city police officer to work on fire department administration tasks.
City commissioner Tom Gilmer asked whether Weber would look at internal or external candidates if the city agreed to hire full-time fire fighters.
“We’d have to look internally,” Weber said. “I think that if we hired from outside it would be seen as a slap in the face.”
The commissioners thanked Weber for the presentation.
Gilmer said, “I think this is very good information. I don’t see how we can sustain this the way it is.”
Commissioner Nick Breedveld said he’d seen his son serve on the fire department.
“I know how people can get burned out with it,” Breedveld said.
Gilmer said he thought the residents served by the fire department would support the need.
“I think the community will understand this,” Gilmer said.
Trobeck thanked Weber for putting together the data.
“This isn’t emotion or feelings,” Trobeck said. “This is facts.”
Contact Dan Pepper at dpepper@allegannews.com or at (269) 673-5534.
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