Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Into the Fire


At the BOT Meeting last night, we had a brief discussion about the SAFER (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response) Grant which provides temporary funding for paid firefighters as well as funding to recruit and retain Volunteer firefighters. With the enormous budget challenges we face, we are not in the position to discuss increases to paid staff, however it was an intriguing idea to utilize a grant to acquire Volunteer resources until we unfortunately discovered that this grant could only be utilized to recruit Volunteers if you have a currently existing Volunteer Fire Department (or Combination Fire Department, which consists of both paid and volunteer firefighters).

However, this prompted some research to see what other communities are doing and it was fascinating to learn that in the 22 Municipalities of Essex County, roughly half have ALL paid firefighters and roughly half have ALL Volunteer fire departments. There were also some municipalities, like Millburn and Bloomfield that have BOTH Volunteers and Paid Firefighters, which are commonly referred to as "Combination" Fire Departments.

Looking further at the entire State of NJ, it was shocking to see that fewer than only 50 municipalities (out of 566) have fully paid fire departments as of 2007! The common misconception is that Volunteer firefighters only exist in the smallest, most rural parts of the state. However, it was very interesting to to see that Volunteer or Combination Fire Departments, exist in all corners of the State, including the most densely populated such as Bergen, Essex, Union, Middlesex and even Hudson Counties.

Everyone acknowledges the tremendous work and bravery of our firemen and women and nobody is suggesting that we should eliminate them and replace them with volunteers. However, our firefighters frequently bring to our attention their requests for additional personnel and from what can be seen from other similar municipalities, a paid fire department supplemented with properly trained volunteers is a sustainable model to protect the community while keeping a control on out of control taxes.

Clearly, further discussions still need to be had to determine the official policy of the Board and there is still more analysis and research that is needed to fully develop a plan to implement this migration. However, the time has come to pursue this seriously for the benefit of the entire community - taxpayers and employees, alike.

As always, I welcome your thoughts. (and certainly would love to hear from anyone who is a current or former Firefighter, or anyone who has any interest in Volunteering to be a Firefighter)

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