Uvalde City Councilman Chip King on volunteer fire department vs. “professional” paid fire department

I recently saw something locally where someone thought it would be a good idea to advocate for “Professional” fire and rescue service here in our community.

    Hmmm, interesting considering Uvalde has long been known to have one of the better volunteer fire departments in the area and in the state. The annual budget for the Uvalde Volunteer Fire Department from the city is in the area of $500K and the county provides a very modest, but appreciated budget for the department. There are an average of 38 volunteers (a good portion are fully certified with well over 10 years of experience) and 3 paid firefighters who work 24/48 shifts.

    We have good equipment and our city insurance rating are very low. Now lets start a “Professional” paid department. Lets keep that 24/48 shift as it is most common. You will need about 4 shifts with eight to ten firefighters on each shift. so lets say 40 paid firefighters at $65,000 a year….that’s 2.6 million dollars and you can figure insurance, retirement and all of the other costs associated. Lets say its a total of 3.2 million for firefighters alone. Now lets get them in PPE at an average cost of $10,000 per firefighter because the paid rules are much different than a volunteers rules on PPE (Keeping these paid guys in PPE would equal the entire current volunteer budget).

    Because the rules are different for paid departments, got to go get and maintain more trucks at a average cost of $500K to 1 million plus per truck. Let’s build, maintain and power more stations now. Research shows for a city of 15 to 20K people, you could expect a $8 to $10 million budget for a fully paid “Professional” fire department. Don’t want your taxes to go up by a huge amount???

  Take care of your “Professional” Volunteer Fire Departments while you still have them and we have one of the best around when it comes to equipment, training and experience.