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