Politics & Government

Fire Marshal Gets Some Part-Time Hours Back

Board of Finance throws criticism at the marshal's office along with additional funds.

After rejecting a two weeks earlier, the Board of Finance grudgingly granted the Fire Marshal's Office a $5,000 special appropriation Tuesday, March 16, to pay part-time inspectors through the end of the fiscal year. 

The two part-time inspectors, who would have otherwise been without a job in New Canaan for four months, will work one day a week for three out of every four weeks on a staggered basis in order to complete the remaining 100 or so new inspections that need to get done by July 1.

"I know there are some long-term performance issues," said First Selectman and Board of Finance Chairman Jeb Walker Tuesday before opening the floor to discussion of the revised request, "but this is a personnel retention issue and a safety issue."

Fire Commission Chairman Roger Williams addressed the criticism saying that the Fire Marshal's Office has begun to track inspections based on which are initial visits, follow-ups, or construction project walk-throughs; the Fire Marshal is also noting the state's frequency requirements for the different types of occupancies the office inspects.

"Will you include information about how long [an inspection] takes?," asked Board of Finance alternate Christine Wagner.

"I will try and make that happen for you," Williams said.

The time needed to complete the necessary inspections was again a big point of contention as the financiers looked for rationalization for the additional funds.

Referring to the estimate that about 129 new inspections needed to be completed in the last 80 days of the fiscal year that Fire Marshal Fred Baker gave March 2 when he presented the original request, Board of Finance member Paul Giusti said, "I don't think there was any compelling reason why we didn't have enough manpower to do it... It seemed like a very reasonable thing to do for the rest of the year."

Extrapolating the annual inspection workload, Giusti said, "it's not that onerous even if you look at a full-year basis."

And he downplayed the importance of the Fire Marshal's non-inspection duties like doing plan reviews and providing safety tips to the public.

"Everybody's trying to do more with less," Giusti said. "Mr. Baker provided a list of all the things that he did in the course of a day—my view would be that the most important thing is to do the inspections. Writing an article for the paper, that's not mission critical."

Williams argued that all the tasks on the Fire Marshal's to-do list support the mission of public safety. He also noted that eliminating the part-timers would amount to a 30 percent reduction in the department's workforce, and suggested it was unlikely any town department had a 30 percent inefficiency.

While asking that the Fire Marshal's Office to ome back with more data on inspections after June 30, the Board of Finance ultimately voted unanimously to approve the $5,000 request.

In the 2010-2011 town budget also approved Tuesday, the board maintained the part-time salary increase for the Fire Marshal's Office of roughly 50 percent over the current year that the Board of Selectman had included in its version of the budget. Fire Marshal Fred Baker is also expected to start doing more inspections himself and Building Department official Paul Payne has started training so that he can do fire inspections one day a week starting in July. 


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