Fannin County Post One Commissioner Earl Johnson donated the entirety of his 2020 commissioner’s salary, close to $10,000, to the Fannin County volunteer firefighters who did not receive hazard pay from the county last year for working calls in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“My original plan was to donate my last year’s salary back to something in the county anyway, and when that came up and no one could agree whether to pay the volunteers or how much to pay them, I thought, ‘I’ll just take this money and divvy it up between them and move on,’ because when it was my money I didn’t have to ask anyone else how they felt,” Johnson said. “Our volunteers comprise a lot of our public safety around here, and I felt like they deserved compensation as well.”
While the Board of Commissioners voted to distribute $500 hazard payments to the county’s first responders in November of last year, they did not include the volunteer firefighters in the distribution.
Fannin County EMA Director Robert Graham expressed the volunteer’s appreciation of the donation, and explained that it did a lot to raise morale among the group.
“I think it was fantastic that he did that,” he said. “Our volunteers are really important, and it’s really great that they were able to get rewarded a little bit for responding during that critical time. It was a real morale booster for our volunteers.”