By John Benson
The Plain Dealer, Cleveland
PARMA, Ohio — City Council is expected to soon approve the trading of antiquated Parma Fire Department equipment to the Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) Fire Academy located at the Western Campus in Parma.
The deal includes the city providing five stretchers for $3,500 worth of fire service training classes.
“Tri-C runs a public safety academy where they teach law enforcement and also a firefighter and paramedic program,” Parma Fire Department Assistant Chief Tony Dalesio said.
“So they’re in need of equipment to train students and people coming into the field, while we’re in possession of some surplus equipment they can use for their training programs. We’ve had an ongoing arrangement to swap surplus equipment for tuition credits for advanced training for our fire department.”
Considering new hires these days all have firefighter certification, the Parma Fire Department sends its leadership positions to Tri-C for advanced training, which includes fire inspector and fire officer certifications.
“Typically for us to send someone to get a certification to be an inspector and inspect buildings and possibly write violations they have to go through a two-week class that has a $650 tuition,” Dalesio said. “Also, when anybody is promoted to a supervisory position, we send them to officer training classes.”
Since 2010, the city and Tri-C have swapped an old ambulance, SCBA packs and old fire hose for tuition credits.
In the case of the stretchers, Dalesio said there’s no way the city would get anything close to $3,500 if the fire department were to attempt to sell the old equipment on the open market.
“The stretchers are an older model and manually operated,” Dalesio said. “Most of the EMS departments are now going to power stretchers to save on back injuries. We actually looked into possibly trading the old stretchers in for credits with equipment manufacturers and there was very little interest.”
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