Fire Chiefs say Proposed Cuts will Affect Service

Budget cuts proposed by Montgomery County Fire Administrator Gordon Aoyagi would eliminate the rescue squad at the Laytonsville Volunteer Fire Department, a move that fire chiefs say could put the community at risk.

The budget proposal, which the county's Fire and Rescue Commission will discuss Thursday, would cut $1.5 million from this year's county fire and rescue service budget and $2.5 million in fiscal 2004. County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) told most county agencies to cut budgets by at least 3 percent. Public safety agencies, such as the Department of Fire and Rescue Services, were told to cut their budgets by 1.5 percent.

Aoyagi's budget proposals include closing a Veirs Mill Road station, removing two ladder trucks and an ambulance from other stations and reducing the number of administrative workers around the county.

At the station on Laytonsville Road, the cuts would eliminate the three paid employees on the rescue squad, said Thomas Musgrove, chief of the Laytonsville Volunteer Fire Department. The squad extricates victims from vehicles in traffic accidents and looks for victims in fires.

Without the paid workers, the rescue squad would not be able to operate during the day. Its equipment could only be used when volunteers are available -- evenings and weekends, Musgrove said.

The station currently has eight paid emergency responders on duty during the day and three at night. Musgrove has asked for additional personnel for nights and weekends, but Laytonsville usually has enough volunteers available to respond to calls.

"Our failure to respond or under-staff apparatus is very minimal," he said.

Still, losing three paid personnel could have more far-reaching effects. Removing a rescue squad from a neighboring department can have a ripple effect on service throughout the county.

The Laytonsville squad serves parts of Olney, Sandy Spring, Gaithersburg and Damascus as well as Laytonsville. Those areas would have to rely on rescue squads from Rockville or Sandy Spring and Germantown if the Laytonsville squad were eliminated, Musgrove said.

"It might have life-threatening results for the citizens of Gaithersburg," said John Luper, chief of the Gaithersburg-Washington Grove Volunteer Fire Department. No cuts have been recommended for that station. During periods when rescue squads receive a high number of calls for traffic incidents, such as when there is inclement weather, another squad may not be readily available for fire calls, he said. "[Laytonsville is] a big component in the rescue squad picture," he said. "And during the day there's just not going to be anybody there."

The reduced manpower would also limit the station's ability to respond in certain emergency situations, such as when deploying a tanker truck to a rural water supply, a call that would benefit from extra personnel, Musgrove said. Eliminating three rescue workers could also cause safety concerns by reducing the number of firefighters available to respond to a fire, he said.

Officials at local fire departments were surprised that community residents were not given more of a chance to provide feedback on the proposed cuts -- introduced Dec. 12 -- since communities served by those departments often help pay for their trucks and equipment, Luper said.

The only personnel implications the proposed budget has for Gaithersburg-Washington Grove would be in reducing administrative personnel that serve local departments from 20 to 12. Those administrators are regularly scheduled at each station and handle bookkeeping, budgets, scheduling, training and maintenance records and other office duties.

The closings and reassignment of equipment proposed by Aoyagi, which would go into effect on Jan. 26, would make already overworked equipment work harder, Luper said. That would mean more calls and higher costs for fuel and maintenance on apparatus, such as Gaithersburg-Washington Grove's Ladder 8, which is already one of the busiest in the county. "There are truck studies and rescue squad studies out there saying these are not smart moves," Luper said. Those studies were conducted by the operations subcommittee of the Fire and Rescue Commission but have not yet been published, he said.

At a Dec. 19 meeting of the Fire Commission, Musgrove said he volunteered to eliminate overtime hours at Laytonsville, resulting in savings of $100,000 a year.

The economic reality has forced some difficult decisions, Aoyagi said. "Initially [you look at] what can you do without impacting service," he said. But fire and rescue services have already cut money for replacing apparatus for the last two years and shrunk administrative staff in recent budgets, he said. "The only place we could cut from was service," he said. "The bottom line is, we came up with what we feel are some relatively surgical service reductions."

That means reducing the number of ladder trucks from 14 to 12 and attempting to address needs that Aoyagi sees in certain areas. His proposal calls for adding a medic unit at Rockville's Station 31 on Darnestown Road, which could serve Gaithersburg and ease the burden on the advanced life support unit at that department's Station 8, he said.

But Aoyagi's proposed cuts are in contrast to a budget proposal by the county Fire Board, which comprises local community fire organization presidents and chiefs. Its budget proposal would not cut personnel or close the Veirs Mill station, but eliminates $1.5 million by delaying certain services included in Aoyagi's budget, such as the medic unit at Station 31.

The Fire Board hopes the Fire and Rescue Commission will consider their proposed cuts as well as Aoyagi's at Thursday's meeting.