Selectmen, fire chiefs and other town officials from across Franklin County continue to look for ways to share fire services and plan a second county-wide meeting on regionalization of some fire services on Oct. 29.
The meeting will be a follow-up to a April 30 meeting at which fire departments from around the county tossed around ideas for sharing resources and listed some of the obstacles to making those ideas a reality.
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Officials in Franklin County are invited to a follow-up meeting on regionalizing fire services. All municipal officials are welcome to attend.
When: 6 p.m. Oct. 29
Where: Franklin Memorial Hospital, Bass Room
Please RSVP by Oct. 27, 2014, to Terry Bell at 778-3235, 491-3235 or tbell@farmington-maine.org.
For questions and suggestions for a future meeting topic, contact Steve Brown, president of the Franklin County Municipal Officers Association, 703A Carthage Road, Carthage, ME 04224, stevebrown@Lycos.com, or 562-8874.
“We’ll see if people really want to try collaboration,” said Farmington Fire Chief Terry Bell.
Fire chiefs were told following the April 30 meeting to regroup with their departments to make a list of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and then share them with the larger group at the upcoming meeting.
At the first meeting, the nearly 80 officials in attendance were brought together by mutual problems facing state fire departments such as aging firefighters, decreasing volunteerism and civic participation, declining department budgets and increasing time required for a volunteer to train as a firefighter.
Fire departments already aid each other in fighting fires, but the town officials in attendance were exploring ways to take mutual aid to a formal partnership.
Examples included combining purchasing power, sharing a station and pooling resources to create a fire district responsible for a territory much larger than that of an individual town.
The Franklin County Municipal Officers Association will host the meeting at Franklin Memorial Hospital. The facilitator at the meeting will be Bill Guindon, director of Maine Fire Service Institute.
Guindon said at the last meeting that in other states, there are examples of fire departments from a region coming together as a region, and the success or failure of such mergers depends on the groups’ willingness to work together.
Kaitlin Schroeder — 861-9252
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