In a recent story in The Voice (8/8/24), Fairfield County Fire Chief Jamie Webb said the county has only six full-time and one part-time paid firefighters and fewer than 90 volunteer firefighters right now.
“We need at least twice that many volunteers to adequately man the county’s 15 fire stations,” he said.
In other words, we have one full-time firefighter per every 115 square miles plus a volunteer shortfall of 90. That equals a disaster waiting to happen.
How clearly this reveals Fairfield’s alarming fire protection vulnerabilities.
It may be unrealistic to think we can achieve maximum staffing immediately, but it is realistic to believe our council could gradually close the staffing gaps with prudent and prioritized budgeting.
The story in The Voice exposed the dangerous firestorm that’s been created by how county council prioritizes its spending. Instead of making progress on fully funding fire service staffing, here are a few examples of how our council has prioritized spending. They chose to spend $500,000 annually on non-government third party agencies (which they are not required to fund); to increase the annual allocation for the finance department by 56 percent over the last two years to $931,000; to almost double the county attorney’s allocation over the last three years from $250,000 to $425,000;
Surely, if council planned and prioritized first responder budgets as they do the funding of their own publicly paid summer vacations at Isle of Palms, we would not be in such dire straits to fully staff our fire service.
Furthermore, if council had followed Performance Budgeting protocol in all critical budget areas, they could have prevented a lot of the troubling issues revealed in the Comprehensive Plan.
While I’m not expecting much from this council in the way of prioritizing the closing of the fire service gaps for both the short term and the long term, let’s pray that in November, our citizens in Districts 2, 4 and 6 will wake up and vote for new leaders who will. Let’s make it a clean sweep.
Our lives and our properties depend on it.
Randy Bright
Ridgeway
