Tontitown Area Fire Department Gives Up City Building; Mayor Asks Volunteers To Not Respond Inside City

Volunteers Will Not Share Space With City Fire Department

The Tontitown Area Fire Department is moving out of its city-owned building.

Mayor Jack Beckford notified the department it must clear two bays and an office in the building it uses.

Insurance Service Office Ratings

The Insurance Service Office rating program is based on an evaluation of a municipality’s Fire Department (50 percent), fire alarms (10 percent) and water supplies (40 percent). The organization analyzes this information and assigns an advisory number from 1 to 10. Class 1 generally represents exemplary fire protection while Class 10 indicates the community’s fire suppression program does not meet minimum criteria.

Source: ISO

"We're not putting them out in the rain," Beckford said. "They can move their equipment to another building."

The city needs the space to store its fire engines, Beckford said. Tontitown has its own Fire Department after contracting with the area department to provide fire and emergency medical response for many years. The contract, about $10,000 per month, was used to pay for full-time firefighters to work during the day.

The notice was first sent to the fire chief in a text, said Paul Colvin, area department board member. Beckford was asked to send the notice by letter to the board, as the lease requires, Colvin said. The area department has a lease requiring 30 days notice to vacate, according to Jim Crouch, board attorney.

The 30 days will be up June 13, Beckford said.

The Tontitown Area Fire Department board voted Monday to move completely out of the building, Colvin said.

"We've had some people offer to keep the engines in their shops until we find some place to go," Colvin said.

The area department also will be asked not to respond to medical calls and crashes, Colvin said. The notice of the change came by email from Beckford, Colvin said.

"I don't think it's very professional to operate that way," Colvin said. "They need to give us official notice of these things, by a letter."

The city Fire Department will no longer need the area department to respond to medical and automobile accident calls once the city department receives all dispatch calls, Beckford said.

"We don't want to leave a gap and not have anyone respond," Beckford said.

The response coverage of the area department includes land outside Tontitown. The area department will be the first responder to those calls, but Tontitown has the right to limit who responds inside the city after officials created a department and reported that to the state, Colvin said.

Frances Franco, Tontitown resident and a former recorder/treasurer for the city, said residents need a good Fire Department.

"We're not going to have a good city Fire Department unless the city cooperates with the volunteers," Franco said. "That's not happening."

The city has purchased one used fire engine with the City Council approving spending $75,000 to buy anther and a brush truck. Most of the area department's equipment was purchased with federal or state grants, Colvin said.

The area department has an Insurance Service Office rating of 4. The rating is used by some insurance companies to set rates. Other companies don't use the service rating.

The best rating is 1. Bentonville and Springdale are rated 2, the highest in the area. The Insurance Service Office rating for the new department hasn't been set, said Robert Andrews, ISO vice president for community hazard mitigation.

Determining the potential effect to Tontitown's rating based on a change of this magnitude will require a comprehensive field study, Andrews said.

The last study of Springdale took three to six months to begin, said Kevin McDonald, Springdale assistant fire chief.

NW News on 05/21/2014

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