The Village of Peoria Heights Board of Trustees is reevaluating how the fire department operates.
Mayor Mike Phelan said the conversation started with the resignation of fire chief Greg Walters in 2019, when the department switched to a hybrid model. There are few paid staff members on the mostly volunteer force.
Phelan said this means a single paid firefighter is on duty during the daytime.
“The board had a lot of questions. And they wanted the administration to provide them with some options,” Phelan said. “So the administrator (Dustin Sutton) provided several options to the board last week; one of those was a contract with the Peoria Fire Department for fire service.”
At a special meeting on Tuesday, Peoria Fire Chief Sean Sollberger presented the details of the potential contract to the village board. He said a proposal of just fire service for a year, estimated using 2022 incident numbers for Peoria Heights, would cost just over $300,000.
The cost would have to be recalculated if EMS calls were included.
Sollberger said the Peoria Fire Department already assists with some fire calls in Peoria Heights through MABAS, or the Mutual Aid Box Alarm System. But he said every department has its limits.
“We have 17 apparatuses that’re on duty every single day. We're not going to send 17 apparatus into Peoria Heights and leave the City of Peoria bone dry,” Sollberger said. “So in regards to MABAS, everyone has a limit and a threshold and then you predetermine what that is.”
Sollberger thinks the community of Peoria Heights would benefit from the staff size, training and equipment his department could offer. He also isn’t concerned about the extra workload created by fire service for Peoria Heights.
“Us assuming, potentially, the responsibility of responding to the Village of Peoria Heights, if that's fire-related calls, we’d be talking about less than one call a day,” Sollberger said. “If that's us going on every single call (including EMS), that would be three to four calls a day; we can assume that it would not have a negative impact whatsoever on the City of Peoria.”
On Tuesday, a few former and current members of the Peoria Heights Fire Department, as well as citizens of Peoria Heights, spoke against entering any sort of contract with the Peoria Fire Department. Some city officials suggested the possibility of a plan that would include a contract with the Peoria Fire Department, while retaining Peoria Heights’ volunteer force.
Mayor Phelan said no decision has been made by the village board.
“I asked them to go home and think deeply on this and get back with the administrator and I'll call another special meeting,” he said.
