Fire department budget nearing $25M
Rather than building bigger fire halls, a city councillor is asking firefighters to consider smaller trucks.
As St. Catharines acting fire Chief Jeff McCormick presented the fire department’s proposed $24.9-million budget to members of the city’s budget services committee Monday, Merritton Coun. David Haywood suggested paying a few hundred thousands of dollars to customize fire trucks, rather than spending millions of dollars on fire hall renovations.
Haywood said he recently read an article about a similar initiative being undertaken by San Francisco’s fire department.
“Is it not possible to have these trucks custom made to better fit our buildings, like San Fransisco is?” Haywood asked. “Even if it was $100,000 more to spend per fire truck, instead of spending $5 (million) to $6 million rebuilding buildings in St. Catharines, have we investigated that to see if it’s an option?”
While McCormick said the city is already customizing fire trucks to fit facilities, he said fire stations still need to be significantly renovated to meet the changing workforce of the fire department.
“We now have female personnel in our department and our stations are not doing a good job of accommodating our female personnel,” he said, adding facility assessments will look those issues.
“I don’t want to just tie everything in to the stations based on what we can put in there by way of a fire truck,” he said. “They also have to look at how we can best accommodate the personnel working out of those stations.”
Port Dalhousie Coun. Carlos Garcia was impressed with $50,000 in budget reductions included in McCormick’s report, particularly almost $41,000 cut from phone bills by renegotiating services.
“Is there an opportunity for us to look corporation-wide for potential savings?” he asked.
Garcia also suggested there could be additional savings realized by limiting the number of medical calls to which firefighters respond.
McCormick asked councillors to wait for a report regarding medical call responses, to allow time to determine how local firefighters would be impacted by a proposal from Niagara Emergency Medical Services to reduce the number of calls they respond to.
“It should have an impact on fire departments throughout the Niagara region, as to what sort of calls they respond to,” he said. “I would suspect the number of calls we respond to would be reduced as well.”
Meanwhile, Mayor Walter Sendzik is concerned about budget projections for overtime and sick pay for firefighters. He said the proposed budget included a $100,000 increase in overtime and a $250,000 increase in sick pay.
“As a budget committee, I would challenge staff to go back and say, ‘We’re going to hold you to the 2017 overtime, and 2017 sick pay.’ What happens is, if you get close to that you need to come back to council and ask council for approval to tap into a reserve fund,” he said. “There has to be responsibility taken by the senior team to say we’re not going to accept further overtime.”
Sendzik also asked if the purchase of new vehicles could be deferred.
“Can you demonstrate that it’s a dire need to have the renewal of the three vehicles or four vehicles?” Sendzik asked.
The additional information will be provided to the budget committee at an upcoming meeting.