The county’s Public Safety Committee released a proposal Wednesday that it plans to submit to the board of commissioners that will begin the restructuring of the county’s fire departments, a move that includes a pay bump for part-time fire staff, a hiring freeze for open positions within the Vance County Fire Department and hiring a consultant to oversee the restructuring process.
The proposal will be presented to the board at a special called meeting on June 14; if it is approved, it would mean amendments to the county budget, which must be adopted by June 30.
More than 25 citizens attended the meeting, held in the commissioners’ conference room Wednesday afternoon, many of whom wore shirts bearing the names of the fire departments they represented: Cokesbury, Epsom, Bearpond, among others.
Commissioner Dan Brummitt said the proposal includes changing the Golden Belt fire district from its current independent, purely county, full-time, status to a split, paid, part-time, part-volunteer department.
Brummitt added that the committee’s proposal does not recommend moving staff from the Golden Belt district, but said the department will need to find additional volunteers.
Brummitt suggested that the department would have the next few months to find those volunteers; in October, the proposal calls for eliminating all paid part-time Vance County Fire Department (Golden Belt) positions. “Through attrition of full time employees, savings would be used to pay for part-time employees,” the proposal states.
Chris Wright, currently the county fire marshal and the county fire chief, expressed concern about the availability of volunteers to help staff the department.
“There are a lot of holes in this and a whole lot of legal liability,” Wright said of the proposal, which also includes separating the fire marshal job from the fire chief job.
As Brummitt explained the details of the plan, he said splitting these duties would mean the fire marshal could oversee all the county’s fire departments and be a liaison between them and the county. Both would be internal hires, he said.
The plan also calls for the Kerr Lake fire department to become a satellite of the Golden Belt department. Any department with a satellite department would get $10,000 added to the annual $100,000 county allotment. Plans will be in place to pay off the debt of the Kerr Lake substation from fire tax funds.