My response to the Mayor on his explanation of fiscal issues affecting our citys Fire Department.. Mayor Will Flanagan, the Herald News reported that the task force for the Safer Grant has not met in 14 Months. Additionally, for 2013 the FRFD salary per the city budget was almost $12 million. My question sir is how many firefighters were retained with those funds in total. If we currently employ 213 and with that complement we spent 12 million did we use the safer grant to fund half of the department each year???? Granted I am averaging things out but a budget of $12 million divided by 213 fire fighters equals about $56,338 per person in Salary divided equally. At that figure if the safer grant was staffing approximately 60 firefighters that would be laid off that would mean the grant monies would be covering approximately 340k a year in salaries. Adding a 100k buffer for benefits and employee taxes on the 60 firefighters, that would still only bring us to 440k per year. This means the safer grant funds should have lasted the city approximately 33 years. Now not all Firefighters are paid 56k a some are more, some are less in any case what all the math above tells me is that more then a third of the department was funded by the safer grant for2012, 2013 & 2014. Lastly I recall you stating that a small amount of the safer grant funds were going to be used to pay for the task force. As a citizen of Fall River whose familys safety will be affected I demand to know how much was diverted to pay the task force, and the total # of times this task force met. As stated the Herald News disclosed that it has not met in 14 months. As you mentioned this is a difficult conversation that needed to take place, I feel that it should have already occurred. Poor accounting practices have taken place within the citys budget.. No deficits were shown or highlighted that would have existed had the safer grant monies not been awarded....
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 03:16:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015