Williams: County ‘not paying its share’
Last Thursday night Wake Forest Fire Department Chief Ron Early, backed by several members from the department’s board of directors, laid out the case for additional funding from the Town of Wake Forest to buy the equipment and staff Station #4 on Jenkins Road.
The construction cost, estimated at $1.75 million, should be covered by the fire impact fees that the town has been collecting since 2007. In addition, the fire department has to hire, equip and train 12 additional firefighters for three four-person crews to provide 24/7 coverage and purchase the firefighting equipment, about $450,000, for a 1,000-gallon tension pumper and perhaps a brush truck for forest fires.
The aim is to have the station built and opened by June of next year.
Early had the facts and figures ready in a PowerPoint presentation; he received a lot of help from Town Manager Mark Williams and Mayor Vivian Jones.
Jones talked about the town’s growth in both population and traffic congestion, making it more difficult for fire engines to reach accidents and fires. “Because of the congestion, they need another station and they have to have more personnel. It makes sense that they need more money.”
Williams compared the independent fire department to the town’s police department, which is adding eight officers this year for an authorized strength of 83 personnel. The fire department has 53 employees.
There is a certain point in all public service departments, Williams said, “when you have to make a gigantic jump” because the need for service has outstretched the resources.
“We’ve always gotten by with what money was available,” Early said, “but now we’re playing catchup. We need more resources. We only ask when it is an absolute necessity.”
Early said he had planned to ask the town for a 2-cent increase for the 2014-2015 fiscal year, but Finance Director Aileen Staples instead suggested a 1-cent increase in each of the next two years. “It’s more practical if we get one penny this year and one penny next,” Early said, because that will meet the costs as they occur.
Wake Forest’s Town Manager and Staples have managed to maintain the same property tax rate since the 2008-2009 fiscal year, a 51-cent tax rate that includes 10 cents allocated for the fire department’s operations. The town’s tax base is now right at $4 billion.
The fire department’s budget for the current year is $4.4 million with $3.8 million from the town and only $700,000 from Wake County. The fire department contracts with both the town – current population 35,609 – and the county – current population in the “rural” fire district outside town is 7,494 – to provide fire protection and first-responder service.
Both Early and Williams expressed dissatisfaction with the support the county gives to the fire departments like Wake Forest that serve the unincorporated county areas.
“The county needs to come into the 21st Century,” Williams said. The unincorporated area the Wake Forest department serves is not really rural, he said. “They really need to think about the service level [needed] and look at the characteristics of the area being served.”
There is a county-wide 8-cent fire tax on property outside town and city limits. Although the Wakette fire district outside Wake Forest is substantially developed with several large subdivisions, the money raised through the fire tax there is not returned to the Wake Forest Fire Department; instead, the county gives poorer fire departments such as Wendell and Hoskins more money than their tax base yields.
“The county,” Early said, “is trying to push fire protection off onto the municipalities.”
“With a single fire tax district countywide, there is no interest on the part of the county commissioners to even consider raising the fire tax,” Williams said. “That’s putting a crimp on us to make up the difference.” The county is paying a third party to undertake a cost share study for the fire tax and the county recently hired Michael Wright as the new fire services director after the position was vacant for two years.
Wake County does pay 100 percent of the cost for the Falls station, #5, which is $275,000, and 22.9 percent of the cost of operating Station #1 (Elm Avenue) and Station #2 (Ligon Mill) but pays nothing for Station #3 (Forestville Road) because the Wake County Fire Division and commission said it was not needed.
Early said the Falls station, which had been an independent rural department until it merged with Wake Forest in 2012 at the county’s urging, is staffed by paid part-time firefighters on week days. “On nights and weekends it’s all volunteers, up to 60 volunteers.”
Later, he told Deputy Town Manager Roe O’Donnell it would be unrealistic to try to staff the Jenkins Road station in part with volunteers because people work out of town and there has been a drop in volunteering in recent years. “We would have to double the number of volunteers” the department has now,” Early said.
Early talked about the continued town growth – Wake Forest is expected to have 45,000 to 47,000 residents by 2025 – and the obstacles the fire department will face logistically once Capital Boulevard is remade into a limited-access highway. The only Wake Forest fire station on the west side of the highway is Falls, much farther south than needed for the 4- to 6-minute response time the department wants for most of its coverage area. (The proposed high-speed rail through town would further split the town and close the Elm Avenue and Brick Street crossings.)
Commissioner Zachary Donahue was the only commissioner – all were present – who questioned the need for increased funding, but near the close of the meeting said, “I support the fire department. I just want to make sure the taxpayers’ money is being spent wisely.”
“It’s not just about putting out fires,” Commissioner Anne Hines said, noting that the department has the heavy burden of being the first-responder to all emergencies. When her mother lived with them and had emergencies, Hines said, the fire department always responded and “got there before EMS most of the time.”
“We truly do not have a job description. We respond to all hazard situations,” Early said. Recently the department was responding to a gas leak in one part of town when a call came in about an unresponsive 3-month-old near Walmart. “Our guys got there and performed CPR before EMS even got there.”
The PowerPoint said that, based on a number of benchmarks that can be quantified such as lowest cost per population (second lowest in the county), the Wake Forest Fire Department provides the best service in Wake County as well as maintaining a high level of training (at least 288 hours per fire fighter per year) and has the best community risk reduction efforts with its community events, fire prevention visits to local schools and hosting visits to the fire houses and apparatus.
Early said the department is considering the distribution of the fire stations for the rapid response, the concentration of fire stations that will allow an effective response force (how many units can respond within eight minutes for a structure fire, and reliability, the ability to have enough equipment and manpower for emergencies.
“One structure fire empties out our department,” Early said, but when a small department such as Rolesville or Youngsville responds to stand by in case of a second emergency “that leaves them with nothing.”
“We want to be big enough to do what we want to do and need to do and not overkill,” Early said.
The Wake Forest town staff is now preparing a proposed budget for the 2014-2015 fiscal year that must be approved and in place by the end of June. There will be a public hearing about the budget before it is adopted.
