By SARA CLIFFORD AND SUZANNAH COUCH
On a grey October Wednesday, Karen Pierce stands at the corner of Main and Van Buren, wearing her Hamblen Township Volunteer Fire Department sweatshirt and holding a boot.
Inside are a few dollars she’s collected during the first hour of raising money for all local volunteer fire departments. Pierce is the treasurer for Hamblen Fire; her husband, Arlan, is the chief.
She waves at cars as they stop at the light. Some people pause and give; some drive on past.
A block away, Jackson Township Volunteer Fire Department Chief Glenn Elmore and Brown County Rotary Club President Bob Willsey are doing the same at the Village Green Pavilion.
In seasons past, the Rotary has organized food drives to help local pantries, but this fall, the focus was shifted to supporting local volunteer firefighters. Pantry shelves are already full due to generous donors, Willsey said.
“We look forward to helping them not just this fall, but throughout the next several years,” Willsey said about volunteer fire departments, which are the only type of firefighters Brown County has.
Rotary teamed up with the Brown County Community Foundation for a Fill the Boot campaign, which took place on Oct. 28, First Responders Day.
“It seemed like a great fit to use Rotarians to help solicit donations in addition to having an active presence in the community during the October rush,” said Maddison Miller, the CEO of the Brown County Community Foundation and a member of Rotary.
The fundraising campaign is not closing until Monday, Nov. 9. More information on how to donate is in a guest column on page A4 of this week’s paper.
“As of Oct. 29, we are 79 percent of the way to a goal of $6,000,” said Sean Hildreth, the marketing, communications and outreach officer for the BCCF. “If we can do a small push and ensure that each department receives $1,000, it is going to help.”
RELATED STORY: How our volunteer fire departments are doing
The pandemic has interrupted fundraising plans for most the county’s volunteer fire departments, and fundraising is necessary for them to cover their annual budgets. Fire departments receive varying levels of support from taxpayers through the public agencies that contract with them, such as the township trustees, the Hamblen Township Fire Protection District and the Nashville Town Council.
More information on each fire department’s specific budget and needs is explained here.
Town’s talks
Discussion about firefighter financial support has come up many times in public meetings over the years, but the topic was revived in late September when a fire broke out at the Carmel Corn Cottage.
Brown County (Nashville) VFD Chief Nick Kelp said the town was lucky. Kelp, who works at Brown County Dispatch at the sheriff’s department, had one other firefighter available to respond with him immediately; the others were at least 15 minutes out due to paid work schedules and/or distance.
About 20 firefighters from three departments worked that night to contain the fire, and they did, to just the one business. There was some fear that it could spread to neighboring buildings, which would have been a disaster for tourism-driven Nashville.
The town council has talked over and over about ways to support firefighters, council members and Strategic Direction Adviser Dax Norton said at the October council meeting. Actually, the day before the fire at Carmel Corn Cottage, Norton said he was talking with Brown County Emergency Management Agency Director Susan Armstrong and Chief of Police Ben Seastrom about fire services, he said.
Over the years, the major efforts that various elected officials have made to get more funding has been met with public resistance. Many of those have involved increasing taxes.
How the town could move further in the direction of paying firefighters to serve Nashville was brought up in a long-term planning session last fall.
“You have a (town general) budget of $750,000 a year. That’s to take care of every single thing that happens, every service you provide in Nashville for an entire year. There are neighborhood associations (elsewhere in the state) that have budgets that are larger,” Norton said.
Town council President Jane Gore was one of the Rotary members out collecting donations in a boot last week.
At the October meeting, she said that to see what a paid fire department would cost Nashville and Washington Township taxpayers, it could cost $10,000 to $20,000 just for a study.
One model that she found interesting when talking with Norton was the idea of PSOs, public safety officers. Whitestown uses them. PSOs are cross-trained in law enforcement, basic firefighting and emergency medical care.
Nashville Chief of Police Ben Seastorm said that PSOs wouldn’t take the place of emergency medical services, but they would be able to provide aid. That plan would require more people, though, Seastrom said.
Regardless of what the town would look at to alter the all-volunteer model, it would be expensive, Norton said. The required standards and training are expensive. Just to start the PSO program, it would cost around $200,000, he said.
“… Yes, there are cash reserves in certain funds the town has,” he said. “… There’s a great cash reserve in the food and beverage account, but you can’t use that for a fire department. You cannot. The state legislature has not enabled you to do so.”
In addition to the $20,000 the Brown County (Nashville) VFD gets in contract money from the town — an increase from last year’s contract amount — it has access to half of a cumulative capital development fund which the town builds from property taxes. The fire department’s portion is a little over $96,000 now. That can be used for equipment or other larger, one-time expenses, as opposed to long-term draws like personnel.
“Ultimately, you’d probably love to have a fire territory with Washington Township. That would be the best-case scenario if we had unlimited amounts of money or if the public was willing to accept the tax increase it would take,” Norton said.
Taxpayers have stopped tax increases in the past.
Washington Township, in 2013 and 2014, tried to raise property taxes in order to pay firefighters. For a limited time, state legislation allowed this as an “emergency fire loan,” which could turn into a revenue stream. The increase was projected to be $55 to $130 a year on a $100,000 property, just for Washington Township residents.
The 2013 plan failed because of problems with the way a hearing was advertised, and residents petitioned against the 2014 plan. Their concerns included “double taxation” for emergency medical services and fairness in only staffing the Nashville station. The Indiana Department of Local Government Finance sided with the residents.
The town council in 2016 supported the idea of joining with Washington Township to form a fire territory, but it didn’t advance to the point of setting it up or funding it.
“You did start a process, you did raise the (fire department’s) budget, and now it’s time to continue the process of what systems can be put in place to help that fire department go from a fully volunteer to maybe a semi-professional, maybe that’s a full-time chief with a couple part-timers,” Norton said “… and moving on to, do you one day ever have a true full-time professional fire department?”
He believes the community is at a “critical point of discussion” on this topic.
“Every time we talk about the cost of it, people get nervous,” Gore said.
Paula Staley, who’d written a letter to the editor demanding that the council fix this problem, attended the October council meeting via Zoom. She asked if the town had tried to get any money from state park gate fees, since local volunteer firefighters protect that asset.
Norton said that’s never gone over well with the state legislature, though it’s a “beautiful idea.”
He sees potential in directing tax increment financing (TIF) money toward fire department needs. But Nashville would have to see enough growth for TIF money to accumulate first.
“We’ve already talked about increasing the TIF area, so we’re working on that as well,” Gore said.
In response to comments she’d heard about the council not looking out for the community, “We are,” she said. “But if we had $1.5 million laying around we’re not using, we’d jump to it. We’d do it tomorrow.”
County’s part
Questions sent to county commissioners Jerry Pittman and Diana Biddle last week about fire department funding were not answered as of press time.
The most drastic change to fire services that the county commissioners made in recent years was to create a Brown County Fire Protection District in 2007. (This was a different group of commissioners than the three serving now.) The League of Women Voters of Brown County had supported this in the 1990s.
The fire district would have been a funding mechanism for departments throughout the county, as it would have created a new unit of government able to levy taxes. That money was envisioned to support up to two full-time firefighters for each station in the district.
Hamblen Township and its fire department wasn’t included, as Hamblen already has a fire district, and Cordry-Sweetwater fire department also wasn’t included because fire district participants need to have borders that touch each other.
Various court battles ensued over the next eight years before ending in 2015. Currently, the fire district only has the purpose of providing fire prevention education, and the commissioners are in charge of deciding what else happens with it, if anything.
If the town and Washington Township were to try to form a fire territory, they’d need the commissioners to let Washington Township out of the current fire district.
Another idea was brought up while lawyers for the fire district and the county were trading arguments years ago: trading the fire district for a county-operated ambulance service or a countywide public safety district.
Kurt Young, who was county attorney at the time and a longtime Nashville volunteer firefighter, and fire district attorney Bill Lloyd discussed those ideas in written correspondence in 2013.
In one model that was proposed, fire departments would not get paid staff, but the county-owned ambulance staff could take the burden of medical runs off those volunteers. Volunteer medical responders could still help if they wished, and volunteers who wanted to only fight fires could do that part. Young believed this could help volunteer retention if they didn’t have to do both fire runs and medical runs.
At the time, the county’s contract with its ambulance service provider, Columbus Regional Hospital, was nearing expiration and costs were expected to increase. The reasoning for developing a new model was that local taxpayers could not afford both an ambulance service and a fire district, so perhaps the two ideas could come together in some way and maybe taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay much more than they were already paying for ambulances.
The countywide public safety district idea had a broader goal: bringing fire protection, emergency medical services, ambulance services, disaster protection and preparedness under a larger umbrella, and maybe also some law enforcement, Lloyd suggested. The League of Women Voters also had supported this effort.
Neither idea became reality. The two attorneys did not come to an agreement, and CRH decided it wanted to continue providing ambulance service to the county at a cost the commissioners were not concerned about, according to emails from Brown County Democrat archives.
The county’s ambulance service contract is up for renewal again. The commissioners are expected to discuss bids at their meeting this week, on Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 2 p.m. via Zoom.
