PARIS — The Board of Selectmen on Monday approved sending a question to public vote regarding funding for per diem firefighters.

The question asks whether voters will approve raising or appropriating $90,995 to pay for the per diem staffing, and gives the options of raising the full amount from taxation or raising $50,000 of the amount from an insurance fund. Selectmen recommended that voters pass one of the options, but did not favor either one.

The special town meeting will include three other items and take place at 7 p.m. at the fire station on July 26.

Chief Brad Frost of the Paris Fire Department first alerted the town of staffing issues in the department in January of 2008. Frost said the problem, common in rural communities across the nation, is that a decline in local businesses has made it more difficult to maintain adequate levels of volunteer firefighters as people travel out of town for work. Frost said the lack of daytime coverage slows response time and thins out the number of first responders. He said this presents a danger to both residents and fire department personnel, and that extensive training is needed to certify new firefighters.

A report by Frost and the fire chiefs in Norway and Oxford in February of 2009 says that 73 percent of emergency calls in the towns occur between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., mostly involving car accidents and other calls that can be handled with an average of four to six responders. The report concludes by advocating that Norway and Paris staff their stations with three per diem firefighters during the day. These firefighters would perform other tasks, such as maintenance and inspection, when not at an emergency scene. Oxford already has per diem firefighters on its roster.

Town Manager Philip Tarr gave examples of recent issues with firefighter availability and response time at Monday’s meeting. On May 28, it took 15 minutes for a truck to leave the Paris station after a mutual aid call, and a call for more personnel resulted in West Paris volunteers staffing the Paris ladder truck. A Paris truck left the station 20 minutes after a mutual aid call on June 30. On July 6, a single firefighter arrived at the station 17 minutes after an alarm at the Market Square Health Care Center, by which time firefighters from Norway and Oxford had arrived on scene.

“Overall these may seem to be the extremes, which they are, but it shows you that the current conditions are fully capable of producing problematic variants, and we are just not able to adequately respond to emergencies in this town,” Tarr said.

Tarr said $89,298 would pay for three firefighters to work shifts from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. at $11 per hour for 246 days of the year, starting on Sept. 1. The remaining $6,697 would pay Medicare and FICA expenses for the firefighters.

The option of taking $50,000 from a reserve account would offset the cost with funds from insurance funds received following the partial collapse of the former fire station on Pine Street in March of 2008. The account has $96,646.32 in it.

Selectman Ted Kurtz said he supported establishing adequate fire coverage, but thought determinations on funding per diem firefighters should have been addressed sooner and gone through the Budget Committee.

“I just feel that it is fiscal insanity to take from a reserve account, an asset account, and pay operating expenses,” he said. “That is the beginning of a road to financial disaster.”

Selectwoman Jean Smart said she was reluctant to propose a tax increase, but thought the measure necessary to ensure safety in the town. Selectman Lloyd “Skip” Herrick agreed that the matter is a public safety issue.

“It’s a crime if we don’t address it,” he said.

Frost said his first preference would be to assign trained people from within the department to the per diem shifts. Chairman Raymond Glover said the funds do not necessarily fund three individual firefighters, but rather compensate different people for part-time people filling daytime shifts.

“These are openings that we’ll get coverage, but the people that are doing the coverage are out of a large pool of coverage,” he said.

[email protected]