- April 19, 2024
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Flagler Beach Commissioner Kim Carney remains the sole voice on the commission in favor of pulling the purchase of a $600,000 fire truck from this year’s budget, even after reading off a lengthy prepared statement at Thursday’s meeting pleading with other commissioners to “slow down” and reevaluate the fire department’s needs.
“We are the ones buying this vehicle,” she said. “I do not feel comfortable with making a $600,000 purchase at this time. The justification is not there. The evaluation of the equipment is not there. The money is not there.”
Carney laid out her case against the purchase of the new truck, called a quint, in a PowerPoint presentation that included graphs of fire department maintenance spending and quotations from leaders in other fire departments who’d questioned the quint’s utility. She said the fire department’s need for a new truck hadn’t been established, and that the commission had been blindsided by the request for such an expensive piece of equipment and had not had properly evaluated it.
And, she said, the city had only put away about $200,000 for the purchase of a new truck. The rest of the money would have to come from the city’s share of the county’s sales surtax revenue.
“We are stripping that fund, and I am opposed to stripping that fund,” she said. “We are spending money like banshees.”
Carney motioned to pull the truck from this year’s budget. The motion died for lack of a second.
The proposed purchase generated a local petition effort opposing it, with organizers claiming 650 signatures — a number Carney’s fellow commissioners questioned at the meeting.
Mayor Linda Provencher pointed out that the commission doesn’t accept petitions, and that Carney refused to consider one presented a few years ago on the issue of beach bonfires.
“You can’t pick and choose what petitions you want to accept and what you don’t want to accept; it’s either all or nothing, so this is nothing. It really is nothing,” Provencher said. “I’m not saying I’m not listening to you,” she said, looking at local residents who’d spoken in public comment against the truck purchase. “But if you’re going to go around and say, ‘I’ve got 650 signatures, and you’re not listening to 650 residents,’ it’s false. It’s absolutely false. There’s not 650 residents on here. Some people signed their name two or three times.”
Commissioner Jane Mealy said some residents told her they felt pressured to sign the petition, and did so to make the petitioners go away.
Commissioner Joy McGrew said she’d read every signature on the petition, and that “there’s a grand number that are not legitimate.”
“I won’t vote to pull it out of the budget,” she said. “If somehow we all decide here tonight that this is not the right year to do it, fine. The money will sit there and go over to next year. But I will not vote to pull it out of the budget.”
As to the facts on the needs of the fire department, she said, “I have to trust the people that ride on that truck, pump that water, put their life on the line every time they go to a car accident or a house fire ... I’ve had to listen to the captain of my fire department tell me he does not believe that piece of equipment needs to be in service anymore, and we need a replacement. That’s all I need to hear.”
Commissioner Steve Settle said he agreed with McGrew. Commissioner Marshall Shupe was absent for Thursday’s meeting.
Fire Captain Bobby Pace, speaking during the meeting’s public comment period, said he had hoped last year that the department’s other ladder truck, Tower 11, would last another few years.
But in the past year, he said, the truck has had repeated maintenance problems.
“This truck has seen better days,” he said. With the quint, he said, “we are more prepared with this truck for the what-ifs.”
The city does have a mutual aid agreement with Palm Coast and Flagler County for fire protection, he said, but their response time would be 10-15 minutes, and Flagler Beach’s would be three-to-four minutes.
If the city gets a quint, he said, “When we have an aerial first on scene, we can be more prepared for fire spread that may occur that needs an elevated water stream … This truck is built to have all the resources on hand, on arrival, not having to wait for aid to arrive.” Fires double in size for every minute they burn, he said.
Provecher, speaking after Pace, said again that she would not vote to pull the truck from this year’s budget, and that she trusts the department’s assessment that a truck is needed. But she warned Pace and the department to make sure the quint is the right one.
“I kind of equate it to when you have a used car, and you think you’re going to make it last another couple of years, and you just end up putting more money into the car than it’s worth," she said. "Sometimes you have to go outside your budget, borrow the money, and get a new car. Having said that, it doesn’t mean you have to buy a Mercedes … I would like to ask the commission, and (Fire Captain Bobby Pace), to really make sure if we’re going to spend this kind of money, that this is the truck that we’re getting. If it’s time for a truck, I want them to be safe, and I want them to have a truck. But I just want to make sure before we spend this kind of money, it is the truck we need."
