HOMER — Banks County Fire/EMS Chief Steve Nichols wants to help the county address some of the challenges it faces because of its rural nature and limited emergency personnel.
In his budget proposal for the upcoming year, Nichols on Friday told commissioners he wants to hire another firefighter/paramedic (fire medic) to be placed at the Banks Crossing station.
“There are some structural changes that we need to make, to make some improvements so we’ve got the coverage we feel like the citizens here deserve,” Nichols told commissioners. “We know that we’re getting to the point where we need an additional fourth med unit put up, and that’s an expensive item. We’re talking over $300,000 to try to get one up and running.
“One of the alternatives that I looked at could possibly curtail some of that cost and carry us for a few years from now is an additional one person at Station 31, which is Banks Crossing,” Nichols said.
That would be a paramedic position, adding to the three positions already in place at that busy station.
“With that fourth person, that allows us to run two on the current med unit that we run and two on the engine assigned down there,” Nichols said. “The person on the engine would be a paramedic.”
In the event the county’s three ambulances are tied up, that paramedic could transfer into the county’s spare ambulance, which already is equipped and based at Station 31.
“Those two people on the engine could rotate to the med unit and run that truck as a fourth med unit, thus putting off the cost of putting that fourth full-time truck in service at another station for a while,” Nichols said.
But having a crew ready to operate another ambulance during crunch times isn’t the only advantage of Nichols’ proposed position.
“It also gives us an opportunity during a commercial structure fire call that we can run our piece of aerial equipment fire truck that we’ve got down there, the engine and the med unit,” Nichols said. “By adding that fourth person at 31, it gives us a lot of versatility that we can go in a lot of different directions and accomplish what we trying to do, particularly in the south end of the county.”
Nichols said he could have prepared a $1-million budget for adding personnel, but he knows that’s not something commissioners could support, nor would he expect them to. That’s why he developed the fourth position proposal for the Banks Crossing station.
“We’re trying to find ways to compensate where our deficiencies are with manpower, without overloading the taxpayers and the citizens right now,” Nichols told commissioners.
Nichols said while the department currently is adding and training new volunteers, those men and women may not live in the immediate response areas where calls occur.
“We haven’t got the volunteer support where we need it,” Nichols said, adding the department is in the process of re-building its volunteer base.
To add one fire medic position at the Banks Crossing station on each of the three shifts, Nichols said it would cost the county roughly $140,000 per year.
“Personally, I’m just not at a point right now where I’m comfortable about adding additional personnel at this point in time,” Commission Chairman Jimmy Hooper told Nichols. “Gentlemen, I think what we’ve done in increasing salaries and fixing our salary schedule, additional personnel for the fire department might be much. That’s my opinion on it.”
Commissioner Sammy Reece said he’d rather wait until commissioners have a better idea of how the tax digest comes in before reaching a decision on the request for the additional fire medic position at Station 31.
After the budget hearing, Nichols shared his opinion of the fire department and discussed the budget requests.
“I think our department is on the right track,” Nichols said. “We’ve made some major improvements in things. We’re still improving and we’ll continue. That’s an ongoing process. A huge part of that is it’s very important what we get financial wise next year, and what we can do and what we can’t do. The commissioners have got the hard part – they’ve got to balance what they’re going to get in tax monies compared to what they can give us to spend.”
Nichols defended his request for the additional position at the Banks Crossing station.
“One of our biggest challenges we’ve got in the county – of course we’re mostly rural, but we do have the challenges of big-city property in the south end of the county around the Banks Crossing area, and that’s where most of our calls are at,” Nichols said. “Currently, we run into issues of where we deplete our medical staff, our med units in the county, which we only have three. We deplete those down, usually on a daily basis. That leaves us nothing.”
Nichols said he believes strongly that his proposal for the additional position at Station 31 in Banks Crossing would alleviate some of the immediate concerns for the county by having the availability to place a fourth ambulance in service quickly, or to respond the ladder truck to commercial fires without delay.
Responding that ladder truck automatically on commercial fires earns the county ISO points, which help with the county’s insurance rating.
“What we tried to do was add enough staffing at that station not only to cover the fire side of it, but to staff up an additional med unit in times that we need it,” Nichols said. “We felt that like was fiscally sound when it comes to spending tax dollars, as opposed to putting an entire [med] unit up in service somewhere. It’s about half the cost.”
