Select Board Meeting Minutes 1/28/20
Minutes of the meeting of 1/28/20
Meeting Opened at: 1pm
Select Board Members Present: Kenneth Basler, Chairperson, Donald Coburn and Steven Weisz
Also in attendance: George Cain, Rebecca Wolin, Jon Sylbert, Michele Miller, Shawn Tryon, Chris Tryon
The Board met with the Finance Committee, Fire Chief and Assistant Fire Chief to discuss their FY21 budget request.
The Fire Company is level funding the utilities and facilities rental and asking for a $975 increase to the equipment and maintenance line item to pay for the require OSHA fit testing.
Beginning January 1st the fire department instituted a new program for training and responding to calls which they outlined in great detail. The new program has a team of 4 on duty from 5:30pm – 5:30am Tuesday – Saturday (although their proposal for FY21 is to have it 7 nights a week). Of the team of 4, 3 would spend the night at the station and the senior officer (#4) would be at their home. This proposal decreases response times and eliminates more firemen than necessary initially responding to a call. If more than 4 are required they would be paged out after the senior officer has assessed the situation. Currently during the trial period of the new program the firemen are paid a $40 stipend for the night and then $25/hour (with a 2 hour minimum) if they are called out. While at the station the 4 members on duty are responsible for checking the trucks and equipment, participating in training, cooking dinner and station maintenance.
The proposal for FY21 would be to increase the call pay from $25/hour with a 2 hour minimum to a flat $50 per call per firemen for calls that come in from 5:30am – 5:30pm lowering that line item from $64,500 to $25,000. For the duty shift which would be from 5:30pm – 5:30am the firemen and officer on duty would be paid a flat $100 per shift and the Chief on call would be paid $40 per shift. This would be a new line item in the amount of $124,100. The training line item would be decreased from $30,000 to $9,600. For an overall net increase to the fire department’s total budget of $65,236 (44.51%).
Chris Tryon explained that they are currently doing this in Gt. Barrington and Williamstown and Dalton are working on instituting this as well.
All the members of the Finance Committee and Select Board wanted more information on the call statistics, trend of calls for at least the last year, number of men that are needed for each type of call and suggested that the fire department should come back with a revised plan that phases in this new program over 2-3 years.
A motion was made and unanimously approved to adjourn the meeting at: 3pm
Submitted by:
Melissa Noe, Administrative Assistant
Approved by:
Monterey Select Board
cc: Website (www.montereyma.gov)
Select Board Members
Minutes Book
Town Clerk
Any documents referred to in the minutes are available by request at town hall.