HENDERSON, NC -- The Vance County Fire Department got another reprieve this week when the County Commissioners agreed to hold a long work session to talk over the merits of a proposed reorganization of the county fire service.
Coming at the urging of Commissioner Leo Kelly, the move means it’ll be at least a couple of more weeks before county leaders decide what to do with a proposal to break up the department’s staff and re-assign its members to two volunteer fire departments.
It also came after County Manager Jordan McMillen, Vance County Fire Chief Chris Wright and other staffers of the county Fire Department voiced misgivings about the plan.
Disbanding the county department “is going backwards, not moving forward,” Wright said, adding that he believes the fire service does need changes but that the strategy proposed by the volunteer-firefighter-dominated county Fire Commission is the wrong approach.
The Fire Commission proposal contends that the breakup of the Vance County Fire Department would free up county money to pay for the hiring of enough part-time firefighters to ensure that two are on hand during the day at each of the county’s volunteer departments.
Advocates like Doyle Carpunky, chief of the Vance County Rescue Squad, contend that would bolster emergency response because the part-timers could respond to 911 calls immediately, without having to wait for volunteers to begin arriving.
The plan “will give residents of the county equal coverage and equal response time in the daytime hours,” said Frank Brown, chief of the Bearpond Rural Fire Department, which stands to pick up half of the VCFD’s full-time paid personnel.
The difficulty is that the Vance County Fire Department currently acts as the fire service’s middle linebacker, responding to calls in its own district, providing aid to calls in other volunteer districts and even backing up the Henderson Fire Department on some calls in the city.
Its district, Golden Belt, also has the most calls and road mileage of any fire district outside the city, plus the highest combined property value. McMillen said he and his staff thus believe “there needs to be a 24/7 presence in Golden Belt,” and don’t think the Fire Commission proposal would provide it.
The Fire Commission — Capunky, Townsville Rural Volunteer Fire Department Chief Daren Small and County Commissioner Carolyn Faines — would convert the VCFD into a volunteer department. Like most of the others, it would get the equivalent of two part-timers during the day.
Hovering behind the debate is the question of money.
The Fire Commission built its plan on the assumption the county would spend no more on the fire service than it does today. Without more funds, there’s no obvious way to reinforce the volunteer departments with part-timers — a move Wright on Monday conceded is needed.
But the only way the county can raise money is by raising taxes, most likely the special fire tax levied on people who own property outside the city of Henderson.
County Commissioner Gordon Wilder suggested Monday the county commit to funding the part-timers and decide the fate of the VCFD later. That idea, however, didn’t get any backing from his colleagues.
Fellow Commissioner Tommy Hester made more headway with the idea of hiring a consultant to examine the fire service and advise commissioners on what to do. But he fell one vote short of putting that through.
Faines and County Commissioner Dan Brummitt stood by their support of the breakup proposal, but on Monday didn’t offer a motion in favor of implementing it.
Brummitt opposed Hester’s consultant proposal, arguing that there’s no point to updating an existing, 10-year-old study of the fire service because “there have been no significant changes in the demographics of Vance County” since 2008.
On the other side, skeptics of the Fire Commission proposal note that it’d commit the county to leaning more on volunteers in the Golden Belt district even as fire departments nationwide find that volunteerism continues to trend downward.
Locally, nothing’s happening to make Vance the exception to that, they said.
“The generation we have now is not the farming generation, it’s the ‘I work in RTP’ generation,” VFCD Battalion Chief Mark Pitzing said, arguing there are fewer people around these days who can drop what they’re doing and respond to a fire call.
McMillen further signaled doubt about the ability to recruit part-timers, noting that existing part-time firefighting positions assigned to work the northern and southern ends of the county go begging about 40 percent of the time.
“If we displace the county fire department, we have to fill them 100 per of the time and if you don’t, the plan falls apart,” he said. “I see the county fire department as a backstop.”
John Bunch, a resident who lives near Henderson, scored the idea of setting up a new volunteer fire department. “The last one was unsuccessful and Vance County bailed them out at taxpayer expense,” he said.
He was alluding to the late-2000s rise and fall of the Kerr Lake Fire Department, which owed debts of $235,000 when the county took it over in 2010, according to a compilation by N.C. fire-service watchdog and blogger Mike Legeros.
The Kerr Lake department’s collapse also yielded a federal criminal prosecution.
Its former president, Robert Minish, turned out to have been abusing his day job with the state to steal guns and other military-surplus hardware the feds intended to share with local-level law enforcement agencies. He stored some of the items at Kerr Lake’s station, piling up enough there that it looked like a junkyard, according to WRAL reports from 2011.
Minish wound up pleading guilty to theft of government property and lying to investigators, and received 48 months’ probation.
The Fire Commission plan presumes that the new volunteer department would fall under the umbrella of the Vance Rescue Squad.
McMillen said that given the Golden Belt district’s importance, “there needs to be a little more due diligence done for a position roster” to make sure the new volunteer department has both a sufficient number of certified volunteers and that enough of them live in the district or near it that they can respond promptly to 911 calls.
Overall, he added, “I would encourage us to find a way to improve coverage everywhere, without taking a step back in one district to take a step forward everywhere else.”
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