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Town hires its first part-time firefighters
(March 22, 2007) The days of an all-volunteer fire department in Davidson have ended. The Davidson Fire Department 
recently added paid “standby” firefighters on weekdays to supplement volunteers.
The change comes as the town copes with an increase in fire and emergency medical services calls amid rapid growth and the difficulty of finding volunteers available at all times, especially during the work week.
TWO ON STANDBY
Davidson is now paying two firefighters to work eight-hour daytime shifts Mondays through Fridays, Davidson Fire Chief Bo Fitzgerald said Thursday.
Chief Fitzgerald said the part-timers will cost the town about $60,000 a year. Eventually, he would like to add paid night time coverage as well.
These fully-trained “standby” firefighters are drawn from a pool of 13 part-timers, most of whom are moonlighting from full-time jobs with Charlotte or other surrounding departments, Chief Fitzgerald said.
Davidson’s 29 volunteers will keep responding alongside the paid staff, and will still be responsible for weeknight and weekend calls, said the chief, who is himself a full-time Charlotte fire captain when he’s not volunteering for Davidson.
“This provides something that we haven’t been able to provide before: a guarantee that when you call 911, you’re going to get a fire truck with qualified individuals on board,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.
The biggest issue is not with the quality of Davidson’s volunteers, he said, but their number and availability.
“We’ve got a great group of volunteers here and they pull a huge load, but they have jobs to do and there are times when they can’t do it,” he said.
GROWTH IN CALLS
When Mr. Fitzgerald started working for Davidson 11 years ago, the volunteer fire department handled about 270 calls a year. In 2006, there were 1,002 calls, including emergency medical services (EMS) responses — a service the town added in 2003. (See chart)
“There’s definitely been a large increase in call volume, and it’s continuing to go up as the population increases,” Chief Fitzgerald said.
Davidson’s population is currently about 8,000, but could nearly double in the coming years, based on the number of new developments approved or in the works. Meanwhile, non-residential construction is also booming, creating a need for improved coverage of office buildings, hotels, schools and other institutions.
INCENTIVES FOR VOLUNTEERS
Part-time standby firefighters are paid about $10 to $12 an hour, according to Town Manager Leamon Brice. The part-time work is being shared among a pool of people to keep costs down. None will work more than 1,000 hours a year, a level at which the town would have to grant additional benefits.
Davidson already incurs some personnel costs for firefighting. Volunteers currently get incentive payments at the end of each year based on the number of calls they respond to, where they live and their level of training. The average check totals about $3,000, Mr. Fitzgerald said.
“It’s a nice little check, but it’s nothing near the hours we end up putting in,” he said.
The incentive payments are a recruiting tool to help keep the department up to staff as the town grows.
STRAINS OF GROWTH
Davidson and other area towns served by volunteer fire companies are feeling the strain of rapid growth, and some fire officials are worried they won’t be able to keep up. Davidson’s volunteer fire department was the lead example cited in a recent Charlotte Observer article about the issue.
Despite the addition of paid staff, Davidson is continuing to recruit and train volunteers, Chief Fitzgerald said. The 29-member staff includes four Davidson College students who are going through certification now, he said. (Chief Fitzgerald invites potential volunteers to contact him by email.)
But recruiting is difficult, and no longer enough, he said. “It’s not just here in Davidson, but across the board. People just don’t have the time. Standards (for firefighters) have increased dramatically. People don’t have time to put in the training we require,” Chief Fitzgerald said.
PAID/VOLUNTEER HYBRID FOR NOW
For now, part-time help is all the town needs; volunteers will still be the department’s backbone, Chief Fitzgerald said.
A full-time professional department is still far in the future, and at least for now, unaffordable for Davidson. A full-time fire department would cost $1.5 million to $2 million annually, he said. And the town would probably need to build a new fire station with sleeping quarters as well.
With the part-timers, he said, “The town is still getting a really good deal.”
WANT TO VOLUNTEER?
Contact Fire Chief Bo Fitzgerald to volunteer with the Davidson Volunteer Fire Department. He can be reached at 704-892-7591 or by email at firechief@ci.davidson.nc.us.
Filed under: Davidson general news, Links, Public safety
I wonder how many of the calls result from wrecks on I-77 between the two Davidson exits. It seems like every day the Fire Department siren blows, followed by a snail parade of displaced cars tying up Main St. for hours.
I-77’s northbound exit 28 and southbound exit 30 are proven nightmares for drivers. They are too short, have poor sight lines, and many more cars than they were designed for. With the opening of the exit 30’s developments later this year, we will be squeezing thousands of trips a day more into that funnel of death.
As usual, regional infrastructure in response to development is lagging behind about ten years. But this time, instead of a little inconvenience, the problem results in 20 mile backups and frequent major disruption to thousands of families and businesses in Davidson and Cornelius, not to mention serious maimings and deaths on the highway.
Is it for this that we’re expanding the Fire/Rescue Department? Might it not make sense to reduce the speed limit in this area to 55mph? It might give I-77 drivers yakking on their cell phones a few extra seconds of desperately needed reaction time to avoid drivers caught in the crowed and too short on-ramps. How about a sign reading “The next 2 miles of road experiences 50 fatal wrecks a year. Slow down.”
The firefighters were hired so that they could respond to all fire and EMS calls (there were over 1,000 in 2006) in the Davidson-North Star Fire District during the days. This district goes all the way to the Iredell and Cabarrus County lines and down to Highway 73.
Reducing the speed limit?? Have you driven through the 55 mph section going into Charlotte? People don’t slow down one bit. How often do you see NCSHP patrolling the north end of 77? Almost never. With no enforcement and only a 2 mile stretch of 55 mph zone, there would be no reason for people to slow down. Yes, the onramps are ridiculously short. If there were to be any changes, they should be lengthening the onramps. But saying that hiring part-time firefighters is a misallocation of funds is rather short-sighted. Like you say, infrastructure seems to be lagging behind development. The fire department is trying to avoid that by hiring trained firefighters during the day in preparation for the rapid increase in residential and commercial property that is to come in the next 10 years.
No, hiring firefighters is not a misallocation of funds. If you wanted to see misallocation, you need look no further than the $2 million traffic circles that were approved for $800,000. The fire department wants only to provide higher quality, more reliable fire and EMS protection for the people in the Davidson-North Star Fire District. They would like a new fire station east of the East Rocky River - Davidson-Concord Road Split and a new tanker truck to serve the areas without hydrants (nearly everything east and north of the split). This would all cost less than two traffic circles. And it would increase the ISO rating of the fire district, thus saving all Davidson and North Star residents money on their homeowner’s insurance.
By no means is the fire department asking for too much for FY 2008. Current response times to outlying parts of the fire district, such as those not supplied by fire hydrants or in the very far reached of River Run, exceed ten minutes. A fire doubles in size every 30 seconds. The delay is not a result of laziness or unwillingness on the part of the volunteers. Instead, it is the simple fact that an engine has to be staffed with enough people then drive all the way to the scene. Adding two firefighters during the day will greatly reduce the first step in that problem, but they can only be a beginning to even better fire and EMS coverage. A station east of the split need not be a palace, only a place to store a couple pieces of apparatus and perhaps small living quarters (the current fire station also has no living quarters). You need only look at the Town of Davidson’s website (http://www.ci.davidson.nc.us/units/planning/devprojects.asp) to see the unprecedented amounts of expansion that will fall far outside an effective coverage area of the current station. On this approved list, there are ten new developments with about 1,500 residential units. Fifteen hundred new houses that are well over six minutes away from the current station. The most notable, of course, include Summers Walk and Abersham. It would seem prudent to have the infrastructure of fire protection in place for these developments before they are in place.
Another budget request that the fire department is making is for a new tanker to service those areas without hydrants. The current tanker is a 1984 GMC that was designed to last ten years in service. The Town’s policy is to replace apparatus after 20 years in service. Recently, there was a fire on Shearer Road, and the tanker would not start. This presents an extreme risk both to firefighters and to the structure and its contents, not to mention occupants possibly still inside the structure. Luckily, the fire was quickly extinguished due to the skills of the Davidson Fire Department firefighters with assistance from Cornelius and Odell Fire Departments.
The Town of Davidson has Adequate Public Facilities Ordnances (APFOs) in place for new boardwalks and more police coverage because it is easy to say, “you as the developer just built the 1,000th residential unit, so you must pay for the additional police officer position, less than $100,000 with benefits, new vehicle, etc.” There is no APFO in place, however, for fire protection. The Town can’t say to a developer, “you just built the 1,000th residential unit, so you must pay for a new fire station and apparatus to fill it and paid firefighters” because that amount exceeds anything any developer would pay. As such, designs for new fire stations, new apparatus, or paid staff have been delayed year after year until now, when the Fire Department took money out of its own budget to pay part-time firefighters.
The Davidson Fire Department provides some of the best fire and EMS skills in the area, but members can’t always get away from work or school to respond to calls. Would you feel safe if you were in a car accident along 77 and an engine arrived with only two people on it? Two people can only do so much (extinguish fires, stabilize vehicles, extricate victims, treat patients, etc.), so adding two more seems like a very wise decision on the part of the Chief.