The spending of the Fire Department is open to review. The reserve fund is for replacement of EMERGENCY equipment. This equipment can’t wait to be approved in a referendum.
Some facts:
With a population of 8,000, the fire departments’ charge per person is $49.49 per year, or if you want to look at the roughly 3100 households, $129.77 per home per year for Fire/Medical/Emergency Service available 24/7/365.
As I mentioned in my first post, the Bungay Fire Brigade members alone donate 7,000 hours for free. What would that cost the town if we were paid like the teachers?
50% of the Education budget goes to salaries and benefits ($7,500,000) as the departments website states. They report a pupil/teacher ratio of 15/1, do the math. Guess what the Fire Department members get?
There are roughly 1,500 students in Woodstock. Each child costs just over $5,000 to educate ($7,500,000 divided by 1500). That’s reasonable.
Finally, I spent two days looking for the BOE budget. It’s not part of the town budget and it’s not online in any of the websites. How’s that for transparency?
Fire Department members are not knuckle dragging, non-voting, non-particpating gorillas that play with “toys”. We are caring, state certified, semi-professionals that have trained for hours to provide every resident with the best protection in any emergency.
The one thing we don’t do is get bogged down in the incessant political yammering, we have important work to do.
Bungay Boy, once you start with the lack of “transparency” references to the BOE budget, you loose my interest, and start sounding like one of those non-achiever- non-intellectual-uneducated “from Bungay” types.
Yes but your work is on an as needed speculative basis and your cost to individual tax payers ($49.49/year) is more of an “insurance” policy than an actual commodity that is used on a regular basis. The vast majority of tax payers will pay into fire/emergency budgets over many years but will probably never need their services (hopefully) and the vast majority of your spending is to have equipment and skilled volunteers in place for “just in case” scenarios. I’m willing to accept that but it needs to be put into perspective. How much equipment do we actually need and how much of it is actually used on a regular basis? How much “important work” is actually being done? Isn’t that a question all households ask themselves when looking at their budgets? For example, why keep adding to a Charter bundle package when only one channel is being watched? Consider the town budget as an extension of individual household budgets since the tax dollars that fund your budget is the culmination of collective household taxes. Keep reminding yourself of that. Next, consider that once luxury spending is cut, your reserve fund is next to go. Put your wish list items on the capital budget plan like everyone else. I think we already have enough equipment to handle any emergency situation that might arise short of a jihadist attack. I commend you on taking a look at the education budget. No stone should be left unturned. And lastly, thank you for your time and volunteerism. It doesn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated. But let’s get back to reality and start putting the taxpayers of this town first!
Bungay Bad Boy;
Nation wide per-capita cost for fire protection is $104.00(N.F.P.A. Publication/America Burning)
State wide per-capita cost is $122.00(Conn. Economic Development Commission)
Town of Woodstock per-capita cost based on 8,000 population is $51.38
We are not semi-professionals but unpaid professionals because we must meet national minimum standards of training.
coup d’moi;
Check with your homeowners insurance and see what they say about fire protection and how it affects your rate.
A Voice, I am not arguing the benefits of having a fine fire protection service in place and realize the effects it has on my homeowner’s insurance, but I am asking for a little perspective. It would appear that the town’s per capita cost is low, but so is our risk. I might add that this town is traditionally not one that likes to compare itself to others. For example, we are in the lowest percentile of spending in the state for education, but that doesn’t stop many individuals from telling us we should even spend less. Shouldn’t that same standard be applied to all town services then??
Now we are getting somewhere.
I said under the “Dog Whistle” article below (before it turned into an on-line version of the Phil Donahue show):
“There are two rational ways in standard decision analysis to asses the level of funding of WFD. One is by objective standard of public agencies (CT Fire Marshall) or “industryâ€? associations. These usually provide regulatory/mandated minimums of equipment/training, etc. which have a specified cost. Second is comparative – say equipment per structure/population/square mile/road mile/etc for similar size/population towns. This would show where we are relative to state standards – like the school spending stats.”
Bungay states there are minimum standards for training/equipment and apparantly WFD meets these. But I don’t think most people or WFD wants the minimum, so this does not help us much.
Voice is getting closer to the point with the statewide comparative statistics and with a little refinement this could be very helpful. I would take the 20-30 towns most like us in geographic area and population and then create a set of measurements based on significant fire-response factors like acccess to water, number of elderly, number/size of structures, etc. and look at our expenditures and response times compared to other similar towns. This doesn’t have to be a fancy statistical analysis, just the basic data.
We might find out, as with the schools, that our expenditures are low and our response time excellent, in which case we have a superb WFD. Or we might find that we are over-equippped for our incident rate and basically overinvesting – on a comparative basis – relative to other towns. That might give the taxpayers cause to slow this part of the town’s spending.
Ultimately, this is the taxpayers choice but they should have reasonable information so they can make that choice intelligently. I do not thin thee choices should be made based on emotional arguments from or loayalty tests by WFD. That is all I think people are saying.
Excellent analysis of the situation BTDT! On-line version of the Phil Donahue show…good one. Newcomer would have us going onto the Dr. Phil show to get this settled (or would Jerry Springer be more appropriate). However, I have to play devil’s advocate here in asking, can your same arguments be applied to the WPS? Especially when you say “Ultimately, this is the taxpayers choice but they should have reasonable information so that they can make that choice intelligently.”