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Question: How do we solve the problem of employee attrition, poor working conditions, and a dangerous infrastructure?
Answer: Show your support! The only way to correct the wrongs is to show up at the Town meeting on 4/6 and 5/11 and cast your vote! Click HERE for more info.
Bad Idea #1 - Get rid of all our apparatus and only use mutual aid.
Towns have "Mutual Aid Agreements." These agreements are monitored by the state and ensure that apparatus, like a fire truck(s), ambulance, or police car, will respond to another town if that town is in need.
The problem with mutual aid is that there are often long delays in the sending town's response time. If we were to solely rely on mutual aid for medical and fire emergencies, our response times would increase dramatically AND our insurance rates (our ISO ratings) would climb as well. The opposition would have you believe that ISO ratings don't make a difference. But, any of you that have kids learning to drive or have had accidents that raised your "step" rating know full well that the insurance industry stratifies risk and sets premiums accordingly. This also applies to home owners insurance. There are a lot of factors; the homeowners insurance rating looks deeply at what your fire service can provide. The person living in Worcester will likely pay less for fire insurance than the person in Princeton that's several miles from a fire station. That's just how insurance companies operate.
Note that Princeton provided almost as much mutual aid last year to surrounding towns as we received! Our mutual aid agreements go out as far as Worcester. We routinely provide (and receive) mutual aid to Holden, Sterling, Westminster, and Rutland.
Aid isn't mutual if we aren't providing any! Point being, those towns won't provide aid for free!
Bad Idea #2 - Form a regionalization agreement. (We would STILL need a new public safety building!)
Regionalization might save money in equipment costs, but personnel costs would overshawdow those savings—AND we would still need a new public safety building!
There are no truly regionalized fire systems in MA as of today*
Regionalization is NOT mutual aid; it is a much more formal agreement.
Like most occupations, firefighting is a specialized skill that requires specific pieces of apparatus for specific tasks. Fire departments have tankers, pumpers, ladders, brush trucks, rescue trucks, and more. Each piece has a specialized purpose, and specialized people trained to use them.
When a town regionalizes, they save money by eliminating some of their equipment and sharing equipment with the other towns in the regionalized system. However, for that to work, each town must maintain 24/7 staffing that meets NFPA standards for the equipment being shared. This is would require more than 8 full-time personnel. In addition to NFPA standards, they must all meet OSHA standards, EMS licensing rules, the State Fire Code (527 CMR 1.00), and regional bylaws and ordinances.
For Princeton, this would also require unionization, because all of the towns around Princeton are unionized. We would have to do the same, resulting in higher wages and benefits costs.
Finally, we would STILL NEED a new public safety building. One could argue that the building could be smaller because we would need less equipment, but we would still need to spend $millions to build this building, and it would take years to work out agreements with other towns (who may or may not be interested). And we would have to protect our existing apparatus until final plans were in place. Building costs have gone up and continue to go up, every year. By the time a regional agreement was enacted, the new structure could cost as much or more than what we are looking at today.
Would you like even more detail on this? Click HERE to dig deeper.
*Marston Mills, Centevile, and Osterville on the cape are part of Barnstable county. They are a collaborative. They are considered villages and not a truly regionalized system. There are no truly regionalized system in Massachusetts.