By Noel K. Gallagher
Portland Press Herald
Copyright 2007 Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
ARUNDEL, Maine — A special town meeting has been called in Arundel to take up a Fire Department request for an additional $250,000 to provide around-the-clock paramedic services. Approval would more than double the department’s current budget of $200,000.
Details of the $250,000 request will be discussed during a meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday at the town’s fire station. The special town meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. July 23 at the fire station, according to Town Manager John Fraser.
Arundel has only one full-time firefighter and fewer than a dozen active volunteers, according to Selectman David Lane, who is also a volunteer driver for the Fire Department. The town relies on assistance under mutual-aid agreements with Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, Biddeford and the Goodwins Mills fire companies. The additional $250,000 would allow the town to hire paramedics on a per-diem basis, Lane said.
A combination of Arundel’s growing population, an increased number of emergency calls and a wave of retiring Fire Department volunteers sparked the proposal, Lane said. The town’s population, at 4,100, is almost double what it was in 1990, he said.
“It’s just gotten to be too much,” Lane said. “We’re starting to see some lapses.”
Lane said mutual aid has been excellent, but the Fire Department has fewer volunteers and emergency calls are increasingly going to neighboring towns.
“That has worked, but it’s burdensome for these other towns,” Lane said. “What we found is that there are a couple of times (of day) when we get no responses (from Arundel volunteers),” Lane said. Generally, there isn’t a local response in the early morning, when people are getting ready for work; or during the afternoon, when most of the volunteers are working outside town.
Volunteers are paged twice on a two-minute cycle before the emergency call is re-directed to mutual-aid towns, Lane said.
The request was not on the regular town warrant because the department had not finalized the cost. The last major item the department put before the town was the cost of a new firetruck in 2006, Lane said. Arundel has a total town budget of $8.6 million.
If residents don’t approve the full $250,000, fire officials expect to consider a scaled-back plan, such as providing around-the-clock paramedic services on weekends.
Ed Groome, chairman of the town’s budget board, said the board has not decided whether to endorse the proposal. Members will make a recommendation after hearing the details at Thursday’s meeting.
“When they presented it to us originally, we were very much in favor of it, but we said let us know what it’s going to cost,” Groome said. “We have other things to consider too, such as school consolidation. We have to keep all these things in mind.”