Fire district tightens its belt with new staffing guidelines

BARSTOW • The Barstow Fire Protection District is preparing to tighten its belt in anticipation of decreasing property tax revenues.

The district’s board of directors adopted new guidelines on engine staffing and overtime at a special meeting Monday.

The new rules will allow engines to roll with a two-man rather than three-man crew under some circumstances and will increase the use of paid-call firefighters.

Under the previous mandated staffing of three men to an engine, if a firefighter called in sick or took a leave, the position had to be filled using overtime hours. Chief Darrell Jauss estimated that the new policies will cut about 80 percent from the department’s overtime budget for the rest of the year. Last year’s overtime costs were more than $300,000 and the district had projected about the same for this year.

The revised staffing plan has been in the works since the San Bernardino County Auditor-Controller notified the district a couple of months ago that it would likely face about a $200,000 shortfall in its 2008-09 budget, Jauss said. The vast majority of the district’s funding comes from property taxes. The state of the economy and the number of foreclosures in the past year are likely to take a chunk out of those revenues, he said.

The new staffing plan is unrelated to the failure of the Measure D sales tax increase proposal in the Nov. 4 election, Jauss said. The proceeds of that measure would have gone to new staff and equipment, not to cover existing costs, and the district would likely not have begun collecting until July of 2009.

Jauss acknowledged the new rules represent somewhat of a step backward in terms of engine staffing. One of the goals of Measure D was to increase staffing enough that every engine could roll with a four-man crew.

Federal safety standards mandate that for every two firefighters inside a burning building, two more must be outside, and with the current engine staffing of three people, firefighters are not able to enter a burning building until a second engine arrives.

Still, cutting back on overtime was a preferable alternative to laying off firefighters, Jauss said at the meeting Monday. He and board members met with representatives of the firefighters’ association last week to go over the proposal.

Board member Ben Rosenberg pointed out at Monday’s meeting that the district has dropped its minimum engine staffing to two firefighters in the past.

“We’ve been here before and we got out of it — I guess we can probably get out of it again if we all play together,” he said.

Story by Desert Dispatch