Fire District’s spending is overboard
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Editor,
In a previous letter to the editor, I said that the Polson Rural Fire District Board “needs to stop spending wildly and cannot stay within the budget.” This statement prompted an e-mail to me from one of the trustees who said, “I don’t understand the basis for these statements.”
Well, let’s look at how this board, since May 2010, has spent some of our hard-earned rural fire district tax dollars. Below are the dates of various board minutes:
June 9, 2010: The Rural Fire District paved in front of the new Fairgrounds Fire Station, and the bill from Fairchild Concrete, Inc. was $23,100.
Then, the Rural Fire District paved in front of the Big Arm Fire Station. Fairchild Concrete, Inc.’s bid was $8,606 on Oct. 13, 2010. This station has had a gravel apron for over 30 years. Why they thought it all of a sudden needed to be paved is beyond me.
The District also bought carpet (June 9, 2010) for the new Fairgrounds Station to help with acoustics, new padded chairs (Aug. 11, 2010) and motion-sensor light switches (Aug. 11, 2010). None of these items has anything to do with fire protection.
They voted (May 12, 2010) to continue the Inter-local Agreement with Polson city “as is,” paying an annual fee of $15,000 (rent?). This makes no sense when Polson city is now housing some of the city vehicles in the new Fairgrounds Station.
They moved $35,000 which had been saved from the prior year’s budget to capital improvements, but then promptly spent it on a brand new brush truck costing $60,000-plus, for Irvine Flats (Sept. 8, 2010) and (Dec. 8, 2010). This truck is housed on a ranch costing us, the taxpayers, $3,250 per year in rent (July 14, 2010).
The Polson Rural Fire District Board, along with the Polson Fire Chief John Fairchild, have announced in the newspapers that they do not have enough funds to provide for the fire department’s accident response service. Under the Long-Range Planning Committee Report (Sept. 8, 2010), the district board discussed alternative funding to support their future needs, not their supposed lack of current funds. The district board plans to extend the truck levy, which expires in 2013. They will request the county commissioners to increase the Plan Review Fee for subdivisions and bill for crashes.
Roger Rogers
Polson
