Firemen gather voters’ signatures

Firefighters in Freehold Borough are in the process of going door to door to solicit signatures on a petition that supports the establishment of a fire district in town.

Michael Burtt, a former chief of the Freehold Fire Department, chairs a committee that was created to undertake the task. He told the News Transcript this week that the petition campaign “is going very well.”

“The response from residents has been very good,” he said.

As of this week, 525 people have signed the petition supporting the creation of a fire district in Freehold Borough, Burtt said.

He said his goal is to obtain between 1,200 and 1,500 signatures on the petition. He said firefighters will be knocking on doors for about another month and then determine where they are in the process.

“When we are ready, we will take the petition to the municipal clerk and have her review it. Then we will wait for the Borough Council to tell us which public meeting we should appear at,” Burtt said.

“The problem we are running into is that many of the homes we are visiting do not have registered voters living in them anymore,” he said. “Many registered voters who were listed on the roster we are working with have moved away and new people who are not registered voters are now living in the homes. And we do have a current list.”

He said the firefighters who are knocking on doors are trying to answer questions residents may ask about what a fire district is and how it works.

Burtt said the firefighters are explaining the process and telling voters that having a fire district in place would allow them to have a direct say in the running of the fire department.

At the present time, the Freehold Fire Department is a function of the municipal government. The Borough Council establishes the department’s annual budget and oversees its operation. Residents do not have a direct say on the fire department’s budget.

With a fire district in operation, Freehold Borough residents would elect commissioners to run the fire district. The commissioners would propose an annual budget to run the fire department and that budget would be placed up for a public vote each year. A fire district tax would be levied on each Freehold Borough property owner to fund the operation of the fire department.

“Most people we have talked to liked the idea of having control, rather than having the council have the control” of the fire department, Burtt said.

The former chief said he has been telling residents he approaches that he would like to hold fire district taxes as low as possible, but like anything else, there are no guarantees that will happen.

According to Burtt, in 2009 the borough paid $577,000 to operate the Freehold Fire Department. There are no paid firefighters in Freehold Borough. All of the members of the department are volunteers.

According to Borough Administrator Joseph Bellina, the 2010 budget for the fire department totals $470,000.

The 2009 figure is higher than the 2010 figure largely due to the salaries of dispatchers who will no longer be on the employment rolls of the fire department for the second half of 2010. The borough’s fire dispatching services have been shifted to Monmouth County.

A spokeswoman for the state Department of Community Affairs, (DCA) previously explained that in order to create a fire district at least 5 percent of the registered voters in a municipality must notify their local government that they would like to see a fire district in the town.

Once the petition stating the residents’ support is certified, meaning that all of the signatures are verified as being registered voters, the local governing body must submit the proposal for a fire district to the Local Finance Board of the DCA and appear before the board.

If the Local Finance Board approves the proposal, the local governing body must introduce and vote on an ordinance to create the fire district.

If the ordinance is adopted by the local governing body, the fire district is created and then the voters of the fire district will elect a board of commissioners, which will be the governing board of the fire district, according to the DCA spokeswoman.