Chelsea Council nominates 2 residents for vacant CAFA board spots; questions items in authority budget

(Publisher’s note: CAFA received unqualified audits, the highest opinion possible, for the last three years, and board members received the auditor’s cover letters in the packet for the Nov. 19 meeting. No significant deficiencies were noted.)

The Chelsea City Council discussed two Chelsea Area Fire Authority (CAFA) items – the proposed 2014 fire authority operating budget and two nominations for vacant seats on the CAFA board – on Monday night.

Unanimously approved as the at large candidate from the city was Tom Osborne, who was introduced as a former Ann Arbor Fire Department captain and a former Chelsea volunteer firefighter.

What’s needed on the authority board, said Council Member and CAFA Board Chairman Rod Anderson, is someone who understands how fire departments work; none of the board members has ever been a firefighter.

In addition, Council Member Jim Myles said that when the city was exploring whether to join the authority, Osborne was chosen as the chairman of a city-wide committee to determine the pluses and minuses of such a move.

Unanimously approved as the alternate for the at large nomination was Hal Moore, who is the current parliamentarian for CAFA, a former volunteer fireman and a retired attorney.

Each member municipality in CAFA – the City of Chelsea and Lima, Lyndon and Sylvan townships, may submit persons for consideration by the CAFA board for the vacancies.

The positions are expected to be filled on Tuesday, Dec. 17 by a simple majority vote of the board, which is currently operating with four members because of the at large vacancy.

The City Council was also given an opportunity to ask questions about the 2014 proposed $1.285 million CAFA operating budget. The elected officials sought additional information about several line items, including staffing levels, the number of officer positions, and the chief’s $8,000 car allowance.

The current staffing level is three captains, three lieutenants and five firefighters. There is one open firefighter position, which will not be filled, and with the adoption of the new operating budget, it’s expected that two firefighters who were brought on staff through a grant will be laid off.

Three years ago, CAFA was able to hire six firefighters through a Federal SAFER grant, which has now expired. So, the authority would need to fund those salaries and benefits by dipping into its reserve funds and long-term projections show that this would put the authority in the red based on revenues from the 1.8 mill tax levy approved by voters in the member municipalities.

In addition, during budget deliberations, CAFA board members agreed that they wanted to have a balanced budget and not go back to the taxpayers for an increased millage.

Council Member Cheri Albertson asked why there were so many captains and lieutenants when the CAFA board planned to layoff two firefighters. She pointed to the $216,000 line item for officers’ salaries and the $93,250 line item for firefighters’ salaries.

Anderson said that during one of the previous budget iterations, included was a reduction in pay for both captains and lieutenants as well as the chief working a shift, but the board decided that the pay cuts didn’t amount to a significant savings and that the board did not want its fire chief working a 24-hour shift.

Also discussed by the CAFA board was doing away with the lieutenant positions and returning them to firefighter status.

“It’s a major reduction in prestige for them and for their careers,” Anderson said, and the board did not want to do that.

In addition, it was explained during a budget work session that on a fire scene, captains and lieutenants have specific duties that are different than those of firefighters.

When asked about the chief’s $8,000 car allowance, Anderson said it was something that had been in the chief’s contract and paid out for the last five years. In addition, he said, the chief had not received a raise for the last several years.

Another aspect on the expense side of the budget is the feasibility of building a substation in Lima Township and staffing it with a truck and one firefighter. This would save $56,000 that’s paid to the Dexter Area Fire Department to cover six sections of Lima Township that are closer to the Dexter fire station than to the Chelsea fire house.

“In firefighting,” Anderson said, “Getting there first is important,” referring to the fact that the faster a fire department can get to a structure fire, the better chance there is of saving lives and the structure.

As an aside to 2014 budget topic, but still involving CAFA finances, Council Member Frank Hammer asked Anderson to forward a copy of the chief’s report regarding missing pages from the last three CAFA audits, which were discovered to be included with the 2010-2012 audits on the state website, but apparently were not given to CAFA board members as part of the audit documents.