Fire Station 88

Tweet

So in my community, the community services district is responsible for fire, parks and rec, CC&Rs, lighting and landscape districts and trash service. The fire service is "igniting" a lot of community concern. Due to higher costs but also past decisions by the board (of which I'm a member), we don't have enough money to fund everything. The committee that was tasked with renegotiating the fire contract, came up with the idea of browning out one of our two fire stations. This started a "firestorm" among our constituents, as you can imagine. In the middle of this, our GM announced he was retiring and our finance officer went out on sick league, and the person who talked me into running for this board has been apologizing to me profusely. So we went from community meetings where maybe two constituents showed up to a full room of angry people. As it should be. Closing a fire station even temporarily impacts not only our community, but also the surrounding ones. There's a mutual aid agreement, and we would have one less engine to send if help is needed, and that means more stress on our neighboring agencies, longer response times, etc. So next week's meeting will propose a plan where we keep the station open, but then we need to find funding sources that will allow us to keep it open, or we will be in this position again next year or the year after. I got into this to learn about government and help my community and it's turning into trial by fire. Pun intended.