VA County Weighs Switch to Volunteer FFs

Oct. 19 -- It appears Vance County Commissioners will have to weigh in soon on a proposal to convert the county’s Fire Department into a volunteer service and re-assign its paid staff.

Commissioner Carolyn Faines told members of the county’s Fire Commission this week that she’ll relay the proposal to her board’s public safety committee, possibly setting the stage for elected officials to vote on it in the near future.

Details, however, are scant because the idea’s advocates didn’t write up a background memo explaining what they want to do and why.

“It might be helpful to have something in writing that the public safety committee can look at,” County Manager Jordan McMillen told members of the Fire Commission as they prepared to wrap up about a 12-minute meeting on the issue Wednesday afternoon.

But Doyle Carpunky, chief of the Vance County Rescue Squad, said the plan calls for breaking up the Vance County Fire Department’s full-time paid staff and “dispersing everybody throughout the county” to bolster the area’s eight volunteer fire departments.

“The pay won’t change, the job won’t change,” he said. “Just where they go to work at.”

He added that the plan also relies on the use of paid part-timers to “backfill the rest of the stations … throughout the day.”

Carpunky in prior meetings of the Fire Commission has argued that the dispersal of the Vance County Fire Department’s paid staff would benefit the entire county, and that there are too many disparities in service levels between the volunteer departments for what residents pay.

Vance County funds fire protection outside the city of Henderson via a mix of countywide property tax revenue and the proceeds of a special tax surcharge of 6.4 cents per $100 of assessed value.

The tax surcharge is yielding nearly $1.8 million in fiscal 2019.

County officials spend almost $1.3 million a year on the County Fire Department, which covers the Goldenbelt fire district adjacent to Henderson’s north and east sides. The Vance department — which has 12 full-time paid firefighters and a full-time paid chief — also answers calls countywide, McMillen said.

Six volunteer departments receive $100,000 from the county each, and two more get about half that or a little more because they also cover Warren and Franklin counties.

Because call volumes, road mileage and population vary significantly from fire district to fire district, lump-sum allocations to the volunteer departments are an obvious source of inequity.

For example, in April, Carpunky complained during a public safety committee meeting that a resident in Kittrell Volunteer Fire Department’s service district on the southern end of Vance County isn’t getting the same level of service as someone in the Goldenbelt district.

Kittrell has about a quarter of the call volume, a third of the population and half the road miles of Goldenbelt, according to background information McMillen assembled for elected officials earlier this year.

McMillen said there’s been no “direct conversation” on the public safety committee about merging some of the fire departments, even though nine for the rural areas of Vance County is a lot for a county its size, particularly in a day and age when most counties find volunteer firefighters hard to come by.

Five of Vance County’s volunteer departments have rock-bottom “9S” service classifications from the N.C. Department of Insurance, the minimum for state certification.

The Vance County Fire Department’s and Bearpond Rural Fire Department’s service districts both get a 6 from the state for most of their coverage area, a fairly common rating across the state. The Drewry Volunteer Fire Department, which also serves Warren County, gets a 7 and the Henderson Fire Department’s service area rates a 2.

The service rating affects insurance premiums for homeowners and businesses. A top-level rating of 1 is rare.

McMillen has given the County Commissioners’ public safety committee proposals that also suggest converting the Vance department into a volunteer district.

Different variants would disperse the full-timers among some combination of the Goldenbelt, Bearpond and Hicksboro Fire Department districts, which between account for most of the workload for firefighters in rural Vance County.

The county manager has also suggested keeping the Vance department intact and bolstering the volunteer departments with part-time paid firefighters during the day.

McMillen’s proposals would raise the county’s costs. Fire Commission members in August said theirs “would have no adverse effect on [the] fire tax.”

Carpunky said the volunteer firefighters’ association is “on board” with the break-up-and-dispersal plan.

But the Vance County Fire Department’s line staff has had “no voice or any input during this process,” said Bryant Williams, one of its battalion chiefs.

Williams said there was supposed to be a meeting between his department’s staff and Fire Commission leaders to gather the former’s “thoughts and concerned about all this.” But it was canceled and the commission hasn’t rescheduled.

Faines, the Fire Commission’s chairwoman in addition to being a county commissioner, took responsibility for that. She said she’d advised the meeting’s would-be organizer, Fire Commission member Darrin Small, that she “didn’t feel it was appropriate” to go ahead with a session for the Vance department’s staff.

“We didn’t want to add any more confusion,” she said, adding that the paid firefighters can come to Fire Commission and public safety committee meetings “to see what’s being discussed.”

Chris Wright, chief of the Vance department, has said the various dispersal plans will wind up “reducing the number of people on the scene” of a fire. “You’re going backwards,” he told the public safety committee in April. “You’re going in the hole.”

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