Beaver Lake Fire Department Gets New Chief

Jerry Owen, left, is retiring as chief of the Beaver Lake Fire Department. Mark Finnochio, right, is the new chief.
Jerry Owen, left, is retiring as chief of the Beaver Lake Fire Department. Mark Finnochio, right, is the new chief.

— Growth is the goal for Beaver Lake Fire Department said new Fire Chief Mark Finocchio.

The department welcomed Finocchio Monday. Jerry Owen, fire chief for the past four years, retired.

Twenty volunteers keep the department rolling.

The biggest challenge facing the new chief, Owen said, is either getting more people to volunteer or converting to a paid department.

Northwest Arkansas is growing, Finocchio said, and he hopes the department will grow also. Finocchio is the solitary paid member of the department. If there is a fire and paramedic call and no other volunteers available, he cannot make it to both, Finocchio said.

Volunteers are needed, but there are fewer now than there once were, Owen said. Beaver Lake volunteers aren’t always available during the day, Owen estimates 90 percent of the district’s calls are medical. Finocchio is a paramedic.

“The reality is, I can’t do it all by myself,” Finocchio said.

Fire Department volunteers are three-quarters of what they once were, said Benton County Fire Marshal Marc Trollinger. Employers don’t let fire volunteers be on call like they used to, there’s a lot of training to become a firefighter and fewer young people are interested in the commitment, he said.

However, a lot of the departments in Benton County are still all-volunteer, Trollinger said.

“For the most part if they’re a volunteer department, it’s a volunteer chief,” he said.

Long-term goals include growing the department by upping the number of volunteers, improving and expanding the services they have, and providing firefighters with better personal gear, said Judy Heineman, chairwoman of the Beaver Lake department’s board.

The board would like to see additional part-time or full-time positions at Beaver Lake, but no plans are in place detailing what those positions would like or how they would be paid for, she said.

“It’s not on the calendar yet,” Heineman said.

Finocchio comes to Beaver Lake from the Edgewater, Colo., Fire Department where he was the first paid fire chief and the last to serve the department. The department served an area of less than a mile outside Denver and at the end of the year, the Edgewater station became the third station for Wheatridge Fire Department.

The department had 1,000 calls a year and Finocchio responded to most of them. The landlocked area couldn’t grow and the city didn’t have the money to support the department, he said. Raising property taxes or sales taxes would have made them the highest in the Denver suburbs and created an unrealistic tax burden, Finocchio said.

“I worked myself out of a job,” he said.

Owen decided to retire on disability after rehab for a rotator cuff was unsuccessful. His doctor told him he was done, Owen said.

“‘You can’t go in burning houses anymore,’” Owen quoted the doctor as saying.

Owen retired from the Rogers Fire Department in 2001 and started as a volunteer with Beaver Lake in 2008.

Owen’s service has been appreciated, Heineman said.

In Beaver Lake, Finocchio said he hopes to hear from the community.

“Any community service has to be driven by what the community desires,” Finocchio said.

Meeting Information

Fire Department Membership Meeting

An annual membership meeting for the Beaver Lake Fire Department will be held at 10 a.m. Feb. 16 at Fire Station 2, 16305 Cypress Lane, Beaver Shores.

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