Proposed
fire fees
approved
By CARL E. HARTDEGEN
Staff Writer
WESTFIELD – The city’s fire commission approved a proposal at their recent meeting which will change the fees charged for fire department services to make them more closely compare with those charged by other branches of city government and other area fire departments.
The changes were proposed by the department’s fire prevention officer, Dep. Chief Patrick Egloff and were hammered out by a committee comprised of Egloff, Fire Commissioner Carlo Bonavita, Fire Chief Mary Regan and firefighter Greg Heath, the department’s superintendent of alarms.
When the change was first proposed last year, Egloff said his goal was to increase the resources available to the department without becoming a burden on the citizens of the city.
Regan had supported his goal saying the proposed changes were a way of “bringing us up to the level charged by other departments and communities the same size as Westfield.”
The committee recommended changes in three areas – smoke detector inspections, inspections of licensed facilities and service to fire alarm master control boxes.
Egloff said that the department has been charging a $40 fee for mandated inspections of smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in single family residences (with an additional fee of $10 for each additional unit in the case of multi-family dwellings) but said that the fee has only been charged when a building passes inspection, no matter how many times he has to check it.
Efloff said that it is not uncommon for him to go out three or four times to inspect the same property and the committee recommended that a charge be made for re-inspection as well.
The change approved by the commission will mean that property owners will pay and additional $40 fee for each re-inspection, no matter how many units there are in a building.
“The re-inspection fee is going to make my life easier” Egloff said. “They’re going to have it done right the first time” to avoid additional fees.
Egloff is also required to make annual inspections of inspections of establishments with liquor licenses, licensed day care facilities and places of assembly, as well as quarterly inspections of health care facilities such as hospitals and nursing homes.
Formerly those inspections to check concerns such as possible obstructions of entrances and exits, availability of properly charged fire extinguishers, fire alarm and suppression systems and hoods over stoves in restaurants and other facilities with kitchens, were made without charge but the commission approved the imposition of fees for those services.
Effective immediately, the recipients of annual inspections will be charged $40 while those whose establishments are inspected every three months will be charged $20 for each inspection.
The third fire department service to be changed involves the 192 master fire alarm control boxes which are the interface between the alarm and fire suppression systems at commercial concerns and the department.
Although a company which has an alarm system pays for the master control box when it is installed but Heath, as the department’s alarm superintendent, services and repairs the equipment without charge and the fire department has paid for the parts required to keep them operational.
That has changed with commission’s action.
Heath will continue to maintain the systems without charge but the owner of the alarm system will now pay for the parts needed such as batteries, circuit boards, antennas, transmitters and power supplies.
“We’ve been bearing the cost of that for years” Egloff said and opined that the change is going to help the fire department.
Carl E. Hartdegen can be reached at [email protected]
