District Year-End Monies

  Friday, November 27th 2009

As is the norm with municipalities, when the fiscal year comes to an end, any unspent funds are usually directed to savings acounts or to other projects. The GFD has an annual "year-end close of the books" meeting to expend any remaining funds and to wrap up business for the year (this year's "year-end meeting" is on December 30th at the Greenfield Center firehouse).

As is always the case, there is a lot of discussion about what we should focus on for year end monies. Generally what usually happens is that Commissioners field requests from officers for funding for various projects that were either (1) denied throughout the year (due to a variety of reasons - which could be financial) or (2) are "outreach" projects which aren't necessarily given a priority funding - but are "nice to have".

For this year's focus I would prefer to address the following:

1. Apparatus Equipment Mounting: one of the things that came out of the apparatus consultant survey was that we need to do a much better job of mounting equipment in our trucks - whether it is in the cab or compartments. The labor required to redo the mounting is fairly large per truck, and the mounting parts aren't the cheapest either - considering their NFPA design requirements.
   
   As this is a safety issue, this should be given priority funding - and I'm pleased to see many of our officers already working on this task, in preparation for the year-end meeting.
2. Hose Replacement: this was the first year the fire district (finally!) tested hose across the district and we found a vast amount of the district hose inventory failed the testing, and had to be removed from service.
   
   Granted that not all this hose has to be replaced all at once, we can put it on a multi-year replacement schedule to help soften the expense - but we certainly need to replace the priority pieces - the one's that failed on our trucks for example. Naturally, I'll be looking to our officers to make that determination, and we'll try and accomodate that listing.
3. Fire Police Radios: with the county transition to higher-band radio frequencies, the GFD has already purchased some high-band radios, and we have discovered that they are actually much cheaper than their low-band counterparts. I have worked closely with the fire police over the past couple of years and I have discovered that they have been under-funded for many years.
   
   Their radio inventory is quite old and antiquated, and unfortunately, has taken a second place to other funding priorities - and this simply must be stopped. Communication when you are standing in the middle of a road is essential to our firefighter's safety, and the radios that are currently utilized by our fire police are half-broken, unreliable and are in need of replacing.
   
   I see no reason that we can't start replacing the fire police radio inventory this year.

Naturally this is not a complete listing and priority items identified by our firematic officers will of course get consideration.

In any case, I wanted to start the creative juices flowing, and to shed some light on what my preferences for year-end monies would be.

Any questions, please just let me know.

posted by spackmann in Opinions at 8:21 AM (287 day(s) old)  Permalink