By Joyce Tsai
Lowell Sun
TEWKSBURY — Thanks to an unprecedented May Town Meeting vote, overriding the town manager’s recommended budget, the Fire Department will have an additional $302,000 to help keep South Fire Station open year round.
And come the start of fiscal 2013, on July 1, for the first time in several years, all three of the town’s fire stations, Central, North and South, will be open and operational.
But lingering questions remain about whether that extra money will guarantee that the station stays open all year, fire officials say.
The money should keep the station open nearly all year long, instead of closing it for five or six months out of the year as was originally planned. But whether that funding will last through the last month of the fiscal year, in June, is more uncertain, said Fire Chief Michael Hazel.
Nonetheless, Hazel said his department “was very thankful to see Town Meeting take that action” in difficult financial times.
“It was certainly unexpected,” he said.
But how long the extra money will last “depends on how the year progresses,” he said. “There are a lot of variables,” such as long-term occupational injuries or training that could come up, depleting more quickly those overtime funds.
That’s because the staffing at the station, despite the department’s total budget of $4.47 million for next fiscal year, is already stretched thin.
“We don’t have any extra people,” Hazel said. “So if we have to fill in (for a lot of unexpected absences), to maintain that level of safety to the community, we could run short in June.”
Town Manager Richard Montuori said the need to dip into the overtime budget could depend on staffing levels if firefighters are out sick or for vacation or personal leave.
Nonetheless, the extra funding will provide a helpful short-term solution, Hazel said. It will staff South Fire Station with a lieutenant and two cross-trained firefighters/EMTs, so that a second ambulance can operate out of that station.
However, due to staffing constraints with just two firefighters/EMTs at the station, even if a second ambulance were put into operation, that would “temporarily place the engine company (at South Station) out of service,” he said.
So even with the opening of South Fire Station yearlong, there’s still a need to add more positions in the long term, Hazel said.
To that end, the town approved the addition of one new firefighter for this fiscal year, but that’s still not enough to meet National Fire Protection Association standards, which calls for a minimum staffing requirement of four on-duty personnel per Engine Company, he said.
“Ideally adding one additional firefighter to each of 4 shifts (which would also expand the EMT rotation to 20 from 16) would allow for flexibility in staffing and increase secondary ambulance availability,” Hazel wrote in a Jan. 27 memo to Montuori and Finance Committee Chairman Thomas Cooke.
He hopes the Fire Department’s staffing needs can be solved over several budget seasons, he said. And the need for a secondary ambulance in town is growing, due to the town’s aging population, he said.
In 2011, not counting the numerous mutual-aid ambulances that responded to the community, the town’s own second ambulance responded to over 310 calls for assistance, Hazel wrote in the memo.
“This is remarkable when you consider the ambulance was unavailable more than half of the year due to staffing and coverage funding shortages,” he said.
In fiscal 2011, the town’s ambulance service also brought $844,837 in revenue to the town, Hazel noted.
The memo also points out that the town’s current level of staffing of 12 full-time firefighters -- at least three men per station per shift -- doesn’t meet the NFPA minimum standards.
However, Hazel said the NFPA standards describe “optimal” staffing that is the “most efficient,” but in reality, towns run the gamut from six people per station down to one.
“We do the best with the resources we are provided,” Hazel said, “and we provide a good service for where we’re at and where we are staffed at.”
However, just how far that $302,000 might also could depend on another factor: the outcome of negotiations between the town and Tewksbury Firefighters Union Local 1647, some say.
For several months, the town and the union been hammering out a successor agreement to a two-year contract that expired June 30, 2011.
Montuori, Hazel and union president Jim Kearns couldn’t go into details on contract negotiations since they are keeping talks confidential.
Yet, Montuori said the contract’s final terms should not have affect how the extra $302,000 is spent in the coming fiscal year, since it is specifically allotted to overtime -- unless the final contract itself directly impacts overtime.
Kearns said the extra money was a separate issue and would not affect the bargaining process. However, he did say that the last time the union negotiated a contract with the town, in 2009, it gave up $100,000 in concessions to help keep the South Fire Station open longer. Those efforts resulted in the station only staying closed two months instead of five months out of the year.
Kearns said the union is in its third year without a pay raise, and that the talks were “amicable.”
He said the Town Meeting’s vote to allot additional money to keep the South Fire Station open was “without a doubt, a huge positive.”
But he stopped short of calling it a victory.
“I wouldn’t call it a victory because it makes it sound like a game,” he said. “And it’s not a game. It’s important for our community to have a fully staffed fire department.”
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