Excerpts from 25newsnow.com:
The Peoria Heights Village Board of Trustees has wrestled with whether or not to outsource its volunteer fire department, but there were talks of transferring the services to the City of Peoria during last week’s board meeting.
The Village of Peoria Heights has discussed this potential move since 20-19. The village administrator believes it could better protect residents, but Peoria fire’s projected costs for fire calls and EMS services would exceed the budgeted amount for 2022 in Peoria Heights. The budget for all fire and EMS last year was $407,000. The projected cost for fire calls alone, if the board of trustees outsources the service, is $1,600 per call.
It’s unclear whether any agreement would be per call or a flat annual rate.
Terms of the contract have not been negotiated yet. The mayor of Peoria Heights said they can’t afford to pay a professional department, and the citizens of the village deserve to have more than one firefighter on duty at a time.
#1 by Dennis on June 29, 2023 - 2:52 PM
Matt C, what do you mean? Should they respond to more or less? There’s a lot of factors that can dictate the number of runs a department does. Anything from demographics to environmental.
#2 by Matt C on June 29, 2023 - 2:46 PM
1200 calls a year for a population of 6000 seems off.
#3 by DENNIS on June 28, 2023 - 9:51 AM
According to their website they respond to 1200 calls a year from 2 stations and all volunteers. It would seem maybe the call volume and possibly the low number of volunteers has put pressure on the administration to either start staffing the stations or outsource it completely. It’s interesting to note that in the news article it mentions the cost of outsourcing is greater than the current department budget. If you take the call volume that’s stated and the price that Peoria would charge per call, you’re looking at $1,920,000.
#4 by Michael m on June 28, 2023 - 8:21 AM
I wonder how the city of Peoria would make this work. I don’t know if the city would take over the Peoria Heights station or if the city would only respond from station 12. Station 12 is the closest city station to Peoria Heights. I don’t know how many calls Peoria Heights gets per year. I guess the other option is the city could re open the fire station that has been closed for a long time, I believe it was called station 17 when it was open. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.