Agenda - 01-16-1999- 3 - Laserfiche WebLink

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facility. Currently, there is little support for these sorts of thing and so individual departments undertake some efforts. A countywide coordination here would be more efficient and benefit all parties concerned. Since the volunteer departments are training the brightest and the best who then serve in Chapel Hill, there must be some common ground for finding a solution to this problem. There is one more problem which like the cost of fire apparatus is looming on the horizon. As the county grows, we will see more and more departments adding paid personnel. There are many reasons for this. With more growth comes more fire and EMS calls. As the Triangle and Triad area create more job opportunities, less volunteers are working in the district in which they live which affects daytime response. In an even more intangible sense, as the pace of the world picks up and a sense of community wanes, there seem to be less people willing to volunteer. It requires a lot of time. In the past few years, we've seen firefighters miss Christmas morning with their families. We've seen them miss holiday meals, Saturday nights, and many good nights of sleep. The problems in the preceding paragraphs add to the frustration and a general malaise brought about as we wonder if all this work is even appreciated. So, for a variety of reasons departments are starting to add paid personnel. At first this occurs during the day and then it slowly moves to nights and weekends. Knowing there is a paid person who will get to the scene first affects some of the volunteer's decision as to if they should respond right away, or wait and see what the emergency is. As such, the paid road is easier to go down than it is to come back. For a small department like Efland, adding two paid people during the day would require a 50% increase in our budget just for the salaries and benifits. When you add in the increased cost of facilities improvements and compliance with OSHA and state regulations, it could almost double our cost. Of course there is benefit to the public in doing this in that the response time to many emergencies improves. But in rural settings, this benefit is not as great as in urban settings. We would like to make two points on this issue. First, we would like the commissioners to be aware that as time goes on, over the next few decades, there will be great increases in the cost of emergency services. These cost increases will not track the county's relentless growth linearly, but will tend to be step like in appearance. This, combined with the cost issues of fire fighting apparatus, will make for more volatility in fire department budget request than have historically been the norm. Our second point is that the value of the volunteers is very real. While one can come up with a paper value based on number of firefighter hours per year and a cost, there is another very real cost of going to paid personnel which at a minimum almost doubles the cost of a small department. It is our hope that all the paid personnel in the county keep the value of the volunteers in mind. We hope the commissioners will encourage the departments to work with us and involve us in decisions. And we hope that the cost of many decisions will take into account the value of the volunteer work and benefit to the citizens, and not