- April 24, 2024
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Changes are likely coming to Flagler Beach’s emergency services departments in effort to keep them sustainable.
City Manager Bruce Campbell proposed eliminating the city’s fire chief and police chief positions and replacing them with captains during a June 18 budget meeting of the Flagler Beach City Commission.
Citing rising costs of operation, Campbell said Flagler Beach’s fire and police services are too expensive in their current states. His plan would also eliminate the assistant fire chief position and restructure some positions within the departments, saving the city about $90,000 next year.
The fire department and police department’s budgets for the last fiscal year accounted for 40% of the city’s general fund.
“Our city is only 4,500 in population,” Campbell said. “With smallness of the city, I think there needs to be some correlation in the sizes of the departments.”
The proposal came during a budget workshop, so no formal decisions were made, but the City Commission agreed to move forward with the plan. Campbell said he will work on creating job descriptions for the newly restructured departments.
Campbell said that as he was preparing answers to a list of questions commissioners gave him about the possibility of merging the Flagler Beach Fire Department with the county department, he began to wonder whether Flagler Beach’s public safety departments were sustainable.
“If we don’t find differing ways of managing the cost structure of these two agencies, we will, in time, become uncompetitive,” Campbell said.
Legally, the city isn’t required to have police or fire chiefs. Commissioner Steve Settle asked whether eliminating them would diminish public safety.
“Absolutely not,” Campbell said. If anything, he said, having working fire and police captains might increase public safety because the captains would be responding to calls when possible.
If approved, the new hierarchy of command for the fire department would place the captain on top, lieutenants beneath that, and finally, firefighters at the lowest level. In the police department, the chain of command would start with the captain before passing to sergeants and then to officers.
Flagler Beach Police Chief Dan Cody said during the meeting he did not agree with the proposed changes, but Campbell said they were necessary to curb costs.
“We want to exist, so if we have to go down to bare bones to do that, that’s what we’ll do,” Campbell said.
