LIVERMORE FALLS – Selectmen supported the Fire Department’s recommendation to apply for a new tanker truck through a Fire Act grant, which would require a 5 percent local match.
Fire Chief Ken Jones told selectmen Monday that firefighters feel the dire need now is for apparatus and, obviously, more than one.
Firefighters have reviewed their options and decided they’d have a better chance to get grant money for a tanker, due to the rural classification of the community, than for any other truck. The top priority in a rural community under the grant process would be water, Assistant Chief Jim Leclerc said Monday.
“We’d really like to replace our tanker,” Jones said.
The tanker is a homemade conversion tanker, which is listed as a danger with an open top, Jones said, that water sloshes out of when driving down the road. The truck has 90,000 miles on it, he added.
The second need is replacement of Engine 3 and the third need is the squad truck, which is overloaded.
Firefighters also wondered about asking for a pumper-rescue truck because a lot of their responses are for motor vehicle accidents, Jones said.
If they took that route, he said, they would be able to respond with one truck instead of two.
“Now we’re asking, what kind of support do we have here?” Jones said.
The 15-year note on Engine 1 has two payments left, with the payoff around $20,000.
When the department applied for the grant in the past and went heavy rescue, “we struck out,” Jones said.
A straight tanker truck would run about $120,000 and a pumper-rescue truck would run in the range of about $400,000.
Selectmen’s Chairman Ken Jacques asked if a pumper-rescue is what the area needs most and if it would fit in with a regional plan, if one is developed.
“At this point, that’s what we need,” Jones said of the truck.
The chief said he agreed with some of a regionalization study but not all of it.
The study looked at Jay, Livermore, Livermore Falls, Farmington and Wilton, and suggested that if Jay and Livermore Falls could reach an agreement on use of Jay’s aerial truck, Livermore Falls wouldn’t need to replace its ladder truck after it’s retired.
“We need our ladder truck,” Jones said, to meet the Insurance Services Office public protection classification program requirements.
“If you feel as a fire department it is better to go for a tanker, than go for it,” Selectman Bill Demaray said Monday.
In other business, selectmen voted to go with a six-panel bronze window configuration for $5,400 from O & P in Farmington to replace a window in the town office that blew out during a severe windstorm.
Town Manager Martin Puckett also informed transfer station attendant Fred Nadeau, when he asked the status of his grievance over nonunion wages, that it was finalized.
Nadeau maintains that the employee handbook said that he should have gotten the most advantageous of the contracts regarding wages, longevity pay and holidays, but selectmen said that nonunion people not covered under police or dispatch would be covered under the highway contract.
Nadeau said the most advantageous would have been the police contract.
Comments are no longer available on this story