Fannin County Fire Chief Larry Thomas is requesting that the county hire 12 full-time, paid firefighters next year, during his department’s budget hearing with the Board of Commissioners Wednesday, October 9.
“As far as the number one increase, I would like to increase the salaries to hire 12 firefighters,” Thomas said. “That would be four per day on a 24-hour shift. That would be stationed at #1, one at #4 and one at #11, but then again that is not set in stone yet as far as being stationed.”
By hiring full-time firefighters, Thomas hopes to decrease the cost of volunteer firefighters to the county.
“Hopefully with the increase in the number of firefighters, that number will go down,” he said.
Post Two Commissioner Glenn Patterson said, “I mean it’s necessary, but it’s a lot of money.”
Thomas told the board that he estimates starting the new firefighters out at $12 an hour. Patterson asked how much that would cost over the course of the year and Finance Director Robin Gazaway told the board it would $380,000 without including benefits.
“You’ve got to add probably another $56,000 for benefits,” she said.
Patterson asked for the rationale in hiring 12 rather than four or six. Thomas responded, “As far as looking back and looking at what other duties that they’ll be involved with, two firefighters, if we started at two which would be a total of six firefighters, would be tasking them pretty well too as far as those day to day operations with fire services.”
Chairman Helton asked, “So if you have six firefighters, that’s enough to operate one shift constantly?” To which Thomas responded, “That would be two per shift.”
Helton asked if six would be a “big improvement” compared to what the department has now. Thomas said it “definitely” would be.
“We’ve had discussions going from when I first came into office, that there would be a time rapidly coming when we would need to start hiring full-time firefighters,” Helton said. “This is completely separate from the ISO issue. This is a county need for safety, response time for that benefit. Now it will have some carry over benefits to the ISO rating.”
Helton said hiring six firefighters would be more reasonable for the county.
“I think 12 firefighters, that is an enormous amount of money for us to come up with just immediately,” he said. “You’re talking if we did that, what it means for your budget, is from one year, from last year to the next, a 68 percent increase in your total budget with 12. I much prefer to go the route, since we know it’s going to help and even if you have six in Blue Ridge they’re still going to be able to respond and help folks in McCaysville and all over the county. It’s not we’re just doing something in Blue Ridge and not helping the county.
“I feel like the time is correct. There’s no doubt in my mind we need full-time firefighters. How many? That’s the question," Helton said.
In other discussion, EMA Director Robert Graham told the board that line items would need to be moved between the Fire, EMA, EMS and 911 budgets due to all of them now being housed in one location.
“When we moved into the new facility we had our telephones, electricity, water, sewage, heating fuel … it’s been all kinds of split up between Fire, EMS, 911 and EMA,” he said. “A lot of those items we technically only have one bill for now because we’re all together in that one building. So what we’re wanting to do is combine some of those line items and put them in one or the other of some of those departments instead of trying to divide it between the departments.”
The EMA department is requesting $130,556, the EMS department is requesting $2,204,683 and the 911 department is requesting $541,370.
911 Director Patrick Cooke is requesting $22,000 to hire a part-time dispatcher to alleviate workload and stress in his department.
EMS Deputy Director Darrell Payne told the board he would like to increase the salaries of the department’s three captains and four lieutenants. He is requesting to increase the lieutenant pay by $0.75 and the captain pay by $1, which would result in an overall $7,500 increase in salaries.
The board will review all requests and work with department heads to determine the final budget for 2020.