Va. county hopes grant will boost fire services

By Cody Lowe
The Roanoke Times

ROANOKE COUNTY, Va. — While predicting that Roanoke County volunteer firefighters and rescue squad members will become extinct in less than a decade, supervisors struggled Tuesday before endorsing a plan to help fill the ranks.

Fire & Rescue Chief Richard Burch asked the supervisors to support an application for federal funds to hire staff to keep stations open.

There is a catch. If the county is successful in securing the homeland security grant of $638,000 — $319,000 for each of the next two years — the county would be obliged to come up with almost $328,000 to pay for the third year of the program.

The money would go to hire six new staff members for the Mount Pleasant station, keeping it staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

From County Administrator Clay Goodman's viewpoint, however, that's money that is far from sure to be available three years from now.

The years of 5 percent and 6 percent revenue growth are over for the foreseeable future, Goodman said.

"In three years, I hope things will improve, really I do, but we can't bank on hope," he said.

Ultimately, the board in a work session told Burch to go ahead with the application, and directed county staff to begin searching for places in the budget to squeeze out enough to pay for the third year.

There's no guarantee the county will get the funding, which is being distributed in competitive grants from a pool of $63 million available nationwide.

Hollins District Supervisor Richard Flora also questioned the wisdom of committing to spending money without a revenue plan to fund it.

In the end, however, he concluded with the others that "down the road, we'll have to do it, whether it's this year, next year or in four or five years."

It now takes 165 hours of training to become an EMT.

"It's not because people don't care. It's not because the county is driving volunteers away," Flora said.

"It's just a huge amount of time consumed in training and answering calls."

He later endorsed an idea raised by Vinton District Supervisor Mike Altizer to start charging a fee for fire department services, much like rescue squads do for ambulance service.

In those cases, rescue squads bill insurance companies for their transport services.

In what is called "soft billing," if a patient doesn't have insurance, or his or her company doesn't cover those charges, the county does not pursue payment.

Altizer said that revenue has been increasing at a rate of 2 percent to 3 percent a year since the fee was first imposed a decade ago.

Division Chief Steve Simon acknowledged that those fees now total just under $2.4 million a year, but he said future increases are questionable because the federal government has capped Medicare reimbursements, which account for about 70 percent of the total.

He also noted that state law requires insurance companies to pay that money to localities, but allows reimbursement for fire services to go directly to fire victims.

Because "there is no requirement for the citizen to pay," if he or she refuses, "the fire department has to go after that individual to try to get it," a lengthy, expensive process that rarely brings in as much as it costs to pursue.

Altizer said he wants the department to bring more information on that option to the board to let it decide if the effort will be worth it.

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