Barrington budget: Manager requesting 4 more firefighters

Positions would cost taxpayers about $270,000 each year

By Josh Bickford
Posted 3/24/17

The town manager is proposing the addition of four new firefighter positions in his proposed municipal budget.

The new positions will cost taxpayers about $270,000, but the manager is quick to …

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Barrington budget: Manager requesting 4 more firefighters

Positions would cost taxpayers about $270,000 each year

Posted

The town manager is proposing the addition of four new firefighter positions in his proposed municipal budget.

The new positions will cost taxpayers about $270,000, but the manager is quick to add that his request will make the town safer.

"I think, as a community, one of our major responsibilities is the safety of our citizens," said Barrington Town Manager Jim Cunha. "This will allow us to have two rescues available at all times."

Currently, the fire department has six firefighters on duty for each shift. This increase will place an additional firefighter on each shift and ensure that a second rescue is always available. Mr. Cunha added that when one of the department's rescues is out on a call, the second will not be made available for mutual aid to other towns, but will instead be on standby for additional rescue calls in Barrington.

"Calls for rescue service over the past ten years have increased by 49 percent," wrote the manager in his budget narrative, "from 1,334 in 2006 to 1,991 in 2016. Rescue mutual aid calls during the same period increased by 43 percent."

Reliance on mutual aid can offer challenges, said Mr. Cunha. Just last year Matthew and Luciana Amaral wrote a letter to the editor after their young son was forced to wait for an East Providence rescue as the Barrington Fire Department rescue was out on another response. 

"That horrifying evening, we thought our son was dying right before our eyes as we waited in a state of panic for the mutual aid rescue truck to arrive," wrote the Amarals. "Barrington cannot afford to not support our first responders. It is unacceptable to lean on the town’s financial budget when we’re talking about people’s lives."

Mr. Cunha referred to the new positions as "a requirement." He added that the National Fire Protection Agency guidelines state that a community as big as Barrington should have 10 firefighters on each shift. 

"We're at six. This will get us to seven," he said.

"The national fire rating service, Fire Insurance Office, in 2014 inspected and rated the BFD manning as a 5 out of 10. This rating has a significant impact on personal property insurance rates for the community," the manager wrote in his budget. 

While safety was the driving force behind the manager's decision to propose the four new positions, there would also be a financial return on the investment. Mr. Cunha said adding the new firefighters will result in additional revenue for billing rescue runs. He estimated that the additional billing would be about $40,000 per year, dropping the net expense for the new positions to about $230,000.

Budget, by the numbers

The additional positions will increase the fire department's overall budget from $1.97 million to $2.23 million. 

The total municipal operating budget is currently about $15.8 million. The manager has proposed an increase of $361,717 or 2.28 percent.

The school operating budget is currently about $42.4 million. School officials are calling for an increase of $1.59 million or 3.75 percent.

The proposed debt service, which would include payments for the $68.4 million bond to build a new middle school, is $5.4 million. The proposed total expenditures (operating budgets, debt service and capital projects) is $66.8 million — an increase of $5.4 million or 8.77 percent over the current budget.

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