By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
The Moapa Valley Fire District (MVFD) will be contracting with a consultant to study the possibility of being administered as a independent local entity. In a set of reports made to the two Town Advisory Boards (TAB) last week, members of the local MVFD advisory committee talked about the ongoing initiative to make a full separation from the Clark County Fire Department.
“We have the opportunity right now to venture out on our own and be not governed or administered by the County anymore,” MVFD committee member Judy Metz told the Moapa Valley TAB members on Wednesday night. “But since I serve at the pleasure of this board I am just here to ask your blessing in going forward and looking at the idea.”
Metz said that she was open to the idea of a separation. But she felt that it was important to get all of the information possible so that a fully informed decision could be made.
In a separate report made before the Moapa TAB on Tuesday night, MVFD committee member Ann Schreiber expressed more misgivings about the venture. “Right now, I am dead set against this,” Schreiber said.
Schreiber added that she was concerned about costs and factors that might not have been considered thus far. She feared that hiring full time staff would overrun the budget and leave the district strapped for cash.
“Thus far there has only been one person who has done any research on it,” Schreiber told MTAB members. “So I think that it should just be set aside until we have a chance to go find out all of the numbers. I’m not for it as it stands, though.”
To gather all of the information, Metz said that the MVFD committee had determined to bring in a “professional and independent party” to prepare a study for the district. Preliminary estimates projected that the cost for such a study would be in the range of $25,000 – $50,000, Metz said.
“That is some money that would have to be spent,” Metz admitted. “But if the change were to take place, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds being administered – even millions if you look over a number of years. So we need to be well-informed on what we are getting into before we make a decision. I think it would be worth the cost of the study.”
Members of both TABs had many questions about the proposal.
MVTAB chairman Gene Houston said that he was open to the idea. But he wanted to see all of the details in place for the entity to be a fully-operating and legitimate fire district. Those details included an locally elected board, clear qualifications set forth for a district chief, an administrative staff plan and all of the district policies and standard operating procedures put in place.
Logandale Fire Station #73 chief David Clegg said that all the policies and procedures were already in place and would not need to change. “We already have a lot of that,” Clegg said. “We already have the entity of the fire district functioning. It has been functioning under policies and procedures for decades.
The only thing different right now is that we are paying the county to administer our funds for us. This idea would just be pulling us back and allowing for local control where maybe we can do a little more.”
Other board members expressed concern about being able to offer adequate training to the volunteers. MVTAB member Joe Perez said that he didn’t want local volunteers to be left with just fundamental Entry Level Firefighter (ELF) training.
“I want to make sure that they have the opportunity to be certified as Firefighter 1 and Firefighter 2,” Perez said. “And it should be equivalent on the EMS (emergency medical services) side. Our guys have to do the same things that they do in Las Vegas and they need to have the same training.”
Clegg agreed with Perez and said that this was another reason why the change might be beneficial.
“You are absolutely right,” Clegg said. “We should have the same training, but we don’t get it right now. That is because the county doesn’t feel that it is important to have that same standard for our volunteers.”
Clegg said that there are local volunteers who are asking for the next level training but are not able to get it because the county won’t provide it for them, even though it would be district funds put out to pay for it.
“And when we at the district level go outside the box and look for other entities to provide us with that training, the county has gotten upset with us about it and told us we can’t do that,” Clegg said. “So what this is really about is where the control should be. Who should be deciding how the district money is spent?”
The issue of manpower was also discussed. Perez asked if the EMS coverage in the community was reliable. Clegg responded that, because it was a wholly volunteer force, there were holes in the EMS coverage.
“There are definitely hours and days when there is no EMS coverage in the valley all,” Clegg said. “There are times when there is no one to respond to emergency calls and those calls have to be routed to MedicWest units or to Mercy Air out of Las Vegas. That means a very long response time in those cases. ”
Clegg said that the two lower valley stations have full rosters of volunteers. But at some times, especially during the workweek, they may not have any volunteers scheduled to man a shift.
Clegg said that a focus needs to be placed on recruiting new volunteers and providing incentives for people to run on calls. He said that better training opportunities and, perhaps, a modest pay-per-call arrangement would provide those incentives for people to volunteer and to actually put themselves on the schedule.
“There are a lot of creative things that we could do to incentivize volunteers,” Clegg said. “But we need to have local control of things to be able to institute things like that. It is too far outside of the norm for Clark County.”
The possibility of hiring paid EMS personnel to ensure round-the-clock coverage to the community was also discussed.
In Moapa, Schreiber expressed concerns that this would cost too much.
In preparation for the meeting, Houston said that he had done some research that seemed to back up Schreiber’s concern. He had called a friend who serves as chief of a small fire department in Saratoga Springs, Utah to ask what the operating costs are there. With two stations running 24 hour coverage it took 12 full time employees, Houston found. The cost was a little over $2 million per year.
“That would obviously be outside of our budget here,” Houston said. “But we probably wouldn’t need that much.”
Clegg said that the local district could get by with far less than that. He said that the district could still use volunteer staff to cover much of the available schedule, then hire full time staff to fill in times when volunteers are customarily in short supply.
“There are a lot of options,” Clegg said. “We could mix and match to fit our need here. We could get by with far fewer full time and then institute a pay per call system for the volunteer side. Another option is to look at a paid reserve system to back up the paid staff. All this could be feasible, but again we would have to have local control to solve some of those problems.”
Both TABs agreed that more information was needed for them to be able to weigh in on the matter.
The Moapa TAB decided to table the issue indefinitely, until more information was available and presented to them.
At the Moapa Valley TAB, board member Brian Burris made a motion to support the MVFD committee going forward with the feasibility study. The motion included the instruction that once the study was completed, it be brought before the TABs again for further direction. The motion was approved with a unanimous vote.
The MVFD was formed in 1965 under Nevada Revised Statute 474. Since that time its revenues and expenditures have been administered separately from the county budget and that of Clark County Fire Department (CCFD).
As a separate district, the MVFD has its own revenue source through an allocation of the Nevada State Consolidated Sales Tax. Operating expenses and capital costs have always been paid with those funds.
Financial reports recently released by CCFD show that the district has annual revenues of between $800,000 and $900,000. MVFD expenses run at around $350,000-$400,000 per year. Surplus funds have been placed in a special reserve fund for the district. Currently that fund is holding just under $6 million.
The district was originally set up with the Clark County Board of Commissioners as its de-facto governing board. The Commission has for many years relegated the day-to-day operations of the district to the Clark County Fire Department. This includes supervision of all of the district’s revenues and expenditures.
But the way has always been open in the law for the district to make the change, if ever it was deemed beneficial, to be governed by a locally elected board.
