West Chester short on goal of 60 firefighters
West Chester Twp. could have reached its goal this week of an all full-time or career fire department by hiring five new firefighters, but reaching the ”magic” 60-firefighter mark has been challenging.
The trustees approved hiring Levi Bailey, Jack Rebholz, Charles Rielage, Cody Swall and Samuel Thompson at annual salaries of $64,757. Trustee Mark Welch welcomed the new firefighters and a new police officer on Tuesday.
“You are going to get plenty of experience here. This is a tough job, but I know that you’re up for it,” Welch said. “The reason you’re up for it is because this is a calling. So execute with excellence, we’re excited to have you onboard, you are joining departments that are second to none.”
With this group, the township has hired 14 firefighters over the past two months. The first batch of five were filling vacancies, the next four were to help reach the goal of a completely full-time career fire department. Fire Chief Rick Prinz told the Journal-News last month he was only four full-time firefighters away from a complete full-time department.
Even with these five new recruits, he’s still two, possibly three, away. He is allowed 60 full-time career firefighters, 18 lieutenants and 20 part-timers. He has 10 part-time firefighters.
“We’ve lost some people and we have had some retirements so those alltrigger other vacancies based upon our overall allotment,” Prinz said. “Our magic number is 60;with the recent hiring we did we have 58 — we still have two more to go. It is like Whack-A-Mole and that number will likely move to three because we could potentially be losing a battalion chief here soon.”
He said one of his command staff has an opportunity to possibly become a chief elsewhere. If that doesn’t materialize he hopes to reach the full compliment of 60 firefighters by late June, “of course if we
have to go deeper than just two employees that extends the timeline.”
The lack of available parttime firefighters and costly over-time pushed the township to creating a career department. The largest increase in the township’s budget this year is for the fire department, with a 12% bump from $17.7 million last year to $19.8 million. Prinz told the trustees during the annual budget presentation they “topped” $1.4 million in overtime due to staffing issues last year.
Welch told the Journal-News he’ll be “very unhappy” if they don’t see the overtime expenditures go down.
“Moving to a full-time force logically makes sense,” he said. “If we can get to that point, then the result can be shown over a period of time in 2023 that overtime has gone down, it’s done its job. Will it get to zero no, but our goal is to move it very significantly below $1.4 million.”
Trustee Ann Becker said “it was a smart decision” to go the career route, especially because finding and keeping part-timers has been very difficult.
“The minute we hire a part-time guy we get them trained up, then he gets hired to a full-time position somewhere else,” Becker said. “It’s to the point where we should just hire them as full-time guys, get them trained and let them stay here.”
Within the county Hamilton, Middletown and Monroe all have career departments. The city of Fairfield is on the career department trajectory after the passage of a new 9.25-mill fire levy and a $3.41 million federal SAFER staffing grant, enabled the city to begin the department’s conversion into an all-full-time staff.
As of earlier this year there is a little more work to do before Fairfield has a truly career department, but they were able to hire 15 full-time firefighters in 2022.
Liberty Twp. is also moving in the direction of a career department — using some of their American Rescue Plan Act money — but Fire Chief Ethan Klussman said they aren’t there yet.
“We received the ARPA grant to pay for three more career firefighter/paramedics.,” Klussman said. “That helps us reduce our reliance on part time employees but we are not in a position to transition to a fulltime department yet.”
Fire departments all across the region have had issues finding good help in part because for awhile young people weren’t going into fire service. Prinz said they are are seeing “the pendulum is starting to swing the other way” in this regard. He said the vocational schools are starting to fill up again, but rather go through the traditional path of part-time employment first, “they are scooped up immediately by another career department.”
Prinz hasn’t had too much trouble finding recruits since he retooled their recruiting process. Previously they offered a $3,000 signing bonus now they will hire new recruits with only emergency medical technician experience and send them to paramedic school — tuition is $10,000 — at the township’s expense, “that opened the flood gates, I think we had 200 applicants,” Prinz said.