The Peoria Heights Board of Trustees is pumping the brakes on a plan to turn the fully volunteer fire department into a “hybrid” department with a handful of full-time employees.
The board voted 4-2 Tuesday to pass a motion to rescind a previous motion to hire three full-time employees for the beleaguered fire department. Trustees Jeff Goett and Jennifer Reichert voted against the motion.
The motion was tabled at the Sept. 3 meeting after Trustee Sara DeVore proposed the reversal. The board wanted to give Fire Chief Dan Decker an opportunity to speak with the board before a final decision.
DeVore raised concerns, explained in detail in a Facebook post from the village, about a $1 million deficit in spending that would grow in the village’s budget over the next three years as they worked to cover the new positions. Trustee Brandon Wisenberg, an outspoken supporter of the fire department’s need for personnel, expressed reservations.
“These firefighters, I don't know them personally, but I assume they have families and they have people that rely on them for housing and food and electricity and that sort of thing,” he said. “And the thought of hiring them when the administration is telling me that there's no money to hire them. It's concerning.”
Peoria Heights is facing multiple expensive upgrades, after running on a budget surplus for more than half a decade, including multi-million dollar water projects. Other trustees at Tuesday’s meeting voiced concerns about the financial impact of the state’s elimination of the grocery tax.
Decker told the board Tuesday that completely rescinding the motion is the “only thing that scares” him. He said, even without planned future restrictions on stipend shifts and volunteer hours, the department currently has open shifts on the schedule.
“It will be devastating, the change that it's going to do to our department,” Decker said. “It's already difficult to fill those spots, and any decrease in personnel or hours that personnel are able to work makes it near impossible.”
This conversation is the culmination of almost five years of attempts to determine the best way forward for the volunteer fire department. The process has included consideration of a contract with the City of Peoria, hiring a new full time fire chief and ultimately voting to bring on the three new employees.
City Administrator and Police Chief Dustin Sutton told the board rescinding the motion shouldn’t be considered a total abandonment of progress on the department.
“We've hired a full time chief, we've increased the budget to almost a million dollars,” Sutton said. “We've increased the stipends considerably. We've made, we've done a lot in a year, you know.”
Sutton stressed, not for the first time in a village board meeting, that further expansion of the department in the village’s current financial standing would likely require cuts to personnel in the police department or increasing taxes.
“We want the same thing, and that’s coverage,” Sutton said. “Now we just have to find out how we’re going to pay for it.”
Though the board decided to end the search for full-time firefighters, even as members of the village’s new fire and police commission were prepared to conclude the hiring process, DeVore said this doesn’t mean the village would never consider these positions again.
“Even if we rescind this today, it's not that we can't revisit this next month or in three months or in six months,” she said before the vote. “A lot of things are changing with our finances. There's a lot of things that are happening.”
It’s unclear if there’s a definitive date or approximation for when the board will revisit the question of how to reshape their fire department.
