Paid, full-time firefighters could work alongside Harford County?s all-volunteer force if a study demonstrates the need.
The County Council added $150,000 to the proposed budget for fiscal 2009 that would pay for a study of integrating paid firefighters with the volunteers to meet the needs of the growing county.
“We?ve got a good infrastructure, but we need some assistance as far as manpower goes,” said Chief Albert “Cubby” Bair, president of the County Volunteer Fire and EMS Association.
“You don?t have that guarantee of someone being in the firehouse every time you get a call. Sometimes they have to come from home, and that takes time.”
Firehouses in the Route 40 and Route 24 corridor respond to nearly 20,000 calls a year, Bair said. The Bel Air Fire Department alone accounts for about 7,000 of those calls, he said.
“They?re running just as strong a schedule as paid professionals, and they?re only part-time,” said County Council President Billy Boniface, a former member of the Level Volunteer Fire Company.
But adding paid firefighters to volunteer forces has caused tensions in some of the counties Harford wants to study, including Prince George?s, Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, Boniface said.
“We?ve seen how other counties have had a disastrous process and taken years to mend fences between the volunteers and the paid staff,” he said.
“Anytime paid firefighters show up, the original people will start to yell, ?It?s the end of the volunteers; we?re going to be replaced,? ” said Patrick Longo, a county resident and paid firefighter in Montgomery County. “They need to realize it?s supplemental staffing. The county doesn?t have enough money to hire 800 firefighters overnight.”
Longo is one of several firefighters who started the Harford Fire Facts Web site in 2007, calling for more paid staff after a fire killed five membersof a family.
Boniface emphasized that the volunteers would not be replaced, considering the cost savings the county enjoys with an all-volunteer force.
The county supplements its emergency medical services staff with paid personnel ? a model that might be followed for the firefighters, Bair said.
