A new report produced by Harpswell emergency services officials provides further evidence that building a central facility on Mountain Road would shorten response times and cost less than a proposed alternative.
The report was created by a local working group after the Harpswell Select Board rejected a request by the Orr’s and Bailey Islands Fire Department to hire a professional consultant to do the work at a cost of $8,300. During deliberations, local fire officials had said they could easily produce a similar report themselves.
Orr’s and Bailey officials have questioned the need for a centrally located fire station and argued that the town would be better served by renovating and adding staff to its existing stations. However, the central station plan has strong support from Select Board Chair Kevin Johnson, Harpswell Neck Fire Chief David Mercier and other local officials.
The report’s authors included two representatives from each of the town’s three independent fire departments: Chris Manos and Peter Melroy, of the Cundy’s Harbor Volunteer Fire Department; Chris Heinig and Harvey Pough, of Harpswell Neck Fire and Rescue; and Kathy Hirst and Jeff Slocum, of the Orr’s and Bailey department.
The town is proposing to build a 12,000-square-foot fire and rescue station that would cost an estimated $6 million. The facility would house a growing cadre of paid emergency services staff and allow faster response times to addresses in north and central Harpswell.
A public hearing has been scheduled for 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 6, at the Town Office for residents to ask questions and voice their opinions. The hearing will be streamed on YouTube, Facebook and Zoom. Town officials plan to have voters decide on the proposal at the annual Town Meeting on Saturday, March 8.
Pough, who serves as rescue chief for Harpswell Neck, presented a summary of the working group’s 18-page report at the Select Board meeting on Thursday, Jan. 30. The report seeks to answer several key questions posed by local officials.
The first question was: What kinds of fire incidents occurred in Harpswell from 2021 through 2024, and where were they? The working group found there were a wide variety of incidents — 1,061 in total — spread out across town.
The report says the even distribution of emergencies, which ranged from faulty smoke detectors to building and brush fires, provided “no basis for evaluating the central station plan compared to three distributed stations.”
Another question was: How would a central station affect firefighter response times compared with those from the three dispersed stations? To answer, the working group looked at response times from the town’s existing paramedic station, near where the central fire station would be built.
Response times from the paramedic station averaged 3.9 minutes faster than those for ambulances responding from the three independent fire stations, the report says. It notes that house fires tend to double in size every minute, which means such fires can grow by 16 times in four minutes.
The report adds that building a central station would shorten response times to portions of North Harpswell and Great Island that are currently underserved, dramatically increasing the number of locations that could be reached in five minutes or less. Longer response times of nine to 12 minutes would be limited to side roads on the northern and southern ends of Great Island.
One key question is whether building a central station would negatively affect volunteer firefighter recruitment and retention, as critics of the plan have suggested. The report’s answer is that it would be just as likely to help such efforts.
It says the construction of a central station would have no impact on volunteers, who would continue to respond from their home stations as they do now. It quotes Ben Wallace, chief of both the Cundy’s Harbor and Orr’s and Bailey departments, saying the addition of paid firefighters and a paramedic crew from Mid Coast Hospital didn’t deter volunteers.
“We heard … that the volunteers might stop because someone else was getting paid to do it,” Wallace is quoted as saying. “In fact, both programs have bolstered our volunteer departments.”
Other questions pertain to the cost of building and operating a central station, and how such costs would compare with the Orr’s and Bailey proposal to improve and staff the three existing fire stations.
The working group found that construction costs would likely be similar. The report says the cost to build a new station in Cundy’s Harbor — required for the alternative proposal — would be about $4.2 million, including $180,000 to acquire 3 acres of land.
The estimated cost of needed renovations to the Harpswell Neck station would be about $1.4 million, the report says. No renovations would be needed at the Orr’s and Bailey station.
The total capital cost of the alternative proposal would be $5,644,180, slightly less than the estimated $5,996,000 for the proposed central station. However, the report says operating costs would be much lower for the central station.
It anticipates the need to staff two firefighters per day, working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, at a total annual cost of $346,218. The alternative plan would require 12 full-time and eight part-time firefighters to staff all three independent stations, which would cost as much as $1.2 million per year, excluding salaries for a fire chief and assistant fire chief.
The report also says staffing the three dispersed stations would create “a variety of operational and financial concerns” related to emergency response coordination and training, the need for additional protective gear, and the possibility that a larger crew of paid firefighters would unionize and demand higher pay.
Select Board members praised the report and thanked the working group for its efforts. Wallace, the Cundy’s Harbor and Orr’s and Bailey chief, said the report contains good information, but noted that it wasn’t presented to or voted on by the town’s Fire and Rescue Planning Committee.
Wallace told the Select Board he supports building a central station, but he criticized the report for failing to articulate the problem Harpswell seeks to solve by building it. He said there is a problem, but not enough voters understand what it is.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is that we’re not seeing enough new people become volunteer firefighters to replace those that are aging out, moving away or becoming inactive in Harpswell,” Wallace said, adding that it’s not from a lack of recruiting efforts.
Wallace said the central station would improve response times across the board, whether for responding to an emergency in close proximity or serving as backup to one of the independent fire departments, all of which face volunteer shortages.
“This is a state and a nationwide problem, and Harpswell is not immune,” he said. “We need folks to join and go to the fire academy every year, and for the first time in years, none of the three departments has anybody in the fire academy this year, and nobody in the pipeline.”
