The Sitka Fire Department wants to use federal funding to help address a staff shortage, but it could mean some additional expenses for the city. When the Sitka Assembly met on Tuesday (1-25-22) it approved the department’s application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for a SAFER grant, or “Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response.” If awarded, the grant would cover most of a new fire engineer and EMT job for three years. But city administrator John Leach said the money would come with some strings. 

“It pays for the salary and benefits, but the important thing to point out is that there is a bit of a commitment on the on the municipality side — standby pay and overtime would not be covered,” Leach said. “But the hope would be that with the additional mostly funded position, that overtime costs would come down.”

Leach estimated the cost to the city would be around $33,000 a year. The fire department currently employs six engineers, but they’ve been working a lot of overtime hours, which Fire Chief Craig Warren said could be alleviated by a new engineer post, or by more volunteers. But as Assembly Member Kevin Knox pointed out, the department has been experiencing a shortage of volunteers in the last year.

“It was my understanding that through COVID, we’ve had a remarkable decrease in our number of volunteers with the fire department. In part because it’s harder to recruit, it’s harder to train, or it has been harder to train and keep people current, and then also harder to retain them,” Knox said. “So our capacity to be able to deal with emergencies and other things like that has been diminished.”

Assembly Member Crystal Duncan asked what the fire department had been doing to attract new volunteers. Warren said he’d been recruiting mostly through word of mouth, but Sitka’s small, isolated population made it challenging to attract new recruits. 

“It’s really hard in our community,” Warren said of recruiting new volunteers. “A lot of communities down south, they have outlying communities that they get to also try to pull people from. In Sitka, we don’t have any neighboring communities that are where I could have a new pool, a new population that I can try to get to. The only thing I really have to offer a volunteer is a chance to help your neighbors and we’ll pay for your training.”

Warren told the Assembly that the department had been in the lurch on more than one occasion recently.

“And twice this year, we were down to one engineer. I was using my predecessor as an engineer covering the radios at times. I’ve had admin staff, myself and the assistant chief and EMS director standing shifts and covering standbys,” Warren said.

“There has been a personnel burden over this year,” Warren continued. “Hopefully, we can turn the corner and start getting volunteers back.”

Ultimately the Assembly approved the application on a 5-2 vote with Assembly Member Crystal Duncan and Mayor Steven Eisenbeisz opposed.