Needham firefighters put out a fire at a house on Watson Road in Needham on May 14. The Needham Volunteer Fire Department is testing out a 24/7 staffing model starting next month.
Submitted photo
The Needham Volunteer Fire Department is making a move to staff one of its stations 24/7, a move the fire chief says is necessary for the growing district.
Johnson County Council members this week unanimously approved an appropriation of $395,000 from the Needham Fire Protection District’s reserve budget to spend on pay for 24-hour staffing.
Needham Chief Jason Cahill took leadership of the department in January. Since then, he spent the last several months gathering data from the last five years on response times and what areas of the district most responses go to, he said.
“I was the first chief that they had ever hired that was never a part of the department previously,” Cahill said. “So that kind of gave me an advantage. So what I did was, I kind of looked at everything from the so-called 10,000-foot level.”
The Needham fire district is the second largest in Johnson County. It encompasses both Needham and Clark townships, spanning 55 square miles of territory to the Marion County line. As the Greenwood area continues to grow, Needham Fire needs to come up with a long-term solution to improve its response times, Cahill said.
“We’re just struggling to find volunteers within our district, we’re struggling to get trucks out the door in a timely manner,” Cahill said.
From dispatch data pulled from 2018 to 2022, 46% of calls for the department were in Needham Township and 54% were in Clark Township.
Relying mostly on the home response method from volunteers and staffing for 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. is not cutting it anymore, he said. Looking at the response data, the most busy time for the department is typically in the evenings, when volunteers are at home. Depending on where a call is in the district and where the responders are, since the area is so large, it sometimes takes nearly 17 minutes to get a truck to a scene, Cahill said.
That’s why Cahill and other leadership came up with a solution and presented test-driving a 24/7 staff model to the Needham Fire Protection District Board. Board members were supportive of the plan. Most volunteer departments in Johnson County have some form of paid 24/7 staffing model, with the Trafalgar Fire Department also making the switch to 24 hours earlier this year.
The plan in Needham is to use money from the fire district’s reserve funds to pay six firefighters daily in two 12-hour shifts in the district, which has two fire stations. Cahill is not sure what exactly the model will look like yet, including what station they will be at, or if they will alternate between the two stations.
The fire district budget has a healthy reserve of about $2 million to pull from to try out this model, Cahill said. With this approval from the county council, he plans to use these funds starting next month to test out this new staffing method through the end of the year.
“We’re going to compare that data over the next four months to the data over the last five years. And, you know, see if that fixes our problem,” Cahill said. “If it fixes our problem, we know what we need to do, and if it doesn’t, then we need to go back to the drawing board.”
Moving to this new 24/7 staffing model is a test to see if it works before the fire district would need to raise taxes for residents as a long-term solution. It is on the radar to request an increase in 2024, for revenue that would start flowing in for 2025.
Spending taxpayer money is not something Cahill takes lightly, he said. That’s why he wants to test out the solution before taking that step.
“We have more than enough to maintain a very, very healthy reserve fund, along with continuing to provide this service through 2024 before we would potentially collect a potential tax increase,” Cahill said. “I hate to use the word tax increase. But yeah, that’s what it is.”
