The effort to regionalize firefighting services in the Northeast Kingdom is still underway — and the problems that precipitated it still linger.
St. Johnsbury and Waterford jointly received a $31,000 state grant last December to study the feasibility of sharing fire services between towns in Caledonia and Essex counties.
That study is now being conducted by Municipal Resources Inc., a New Hampshire–based company. The town of Littleton, across the state line from St. Johnsbury, recently contracted the outfit to help find a new fire chief.
“They are doing data collection right now,” St. Johnsbury Fire Chief Jon Bouffard said this week.
Six towns have signed on as participants in the study: Barnet, Concord, Danville, Lyndon, St. Johnsbury and Waterford.
In late May, representatives from each town met with the consultants to hear what data was needed, St. Johnsbury Town Manager Chad Whitehead said.
The list included equipment owned, assets, call volumes and more, he said.
Officials now await the results of the study. But in the meantime, they’re still dealing with the staffing struggles that got towns thinking about regionalization.
“We and a lot of departments struggle with becoming fully staffed,” Whitehead said.
His town’s fire department — the only full-time, 24/7 one in the area, he said — is allowed to have up to 25 on-call responders along with its 11 full-time members.
But only eight of those on-call slots are filled, Bouffard said.
Part of the problem is that employers are more reluctant than they once were to release on-call firefighters from their day jobs to respond to calls, Whitehead said. And training requirements over the years have increased, he said, making it more time-consuming to join the on-call roster.
Other departments around the southern Kingdom experience the same struggle as St. Johnsbury’s, Whitehead said, something he highlighted last summer during a selectboard meeting.
“We all have kind of the same problems,” he said this week. “None of us are full.”
And to support St. Johnsbury’s full-time fire department financially, he said, serving a larger population is “kind of what we need.”
The grant for the effort came from the state Agency of Commerce and Community Development; the Northeastern Vermont Development Association is administering the money.
The study report is due next spring, Bouffard said, but “there’s some indication that they could be done earlier, like the beginning of the year.”
What comes next ultimately rests with individual towns. “The political bodies are going to have to make the decisions; the fire chiefs are just going to be the fact providers,” the chief said.
Either way, he hopes the study will be able to tell him and other officials whether the proposal could turn into a solution.
