Wake Forest Gazette

            Within two years the Falls Fire Department and its 20-some volunteers will merge with the Wake Forest Fire Department, and the Wake Forest department will expand its service area to a long strip along Falls of the Neuse Road from near Raven Ridge Road almost to Old N.C. 98.
            Last week Wake Forest Fire Chief Alfred “Freddy” Lynn said he knew Wake County planned to close the Falls department in two years, and he saw an opportunity. He sat down with Chris Wilson, the Falls fire chief, to talk about a possible merger that would keep the talents of the 20 or so volunteers and the fire trucks in this area. He kept the Wake Forest department’s board of directors informed, and the next step was a meeting between the two boards. They agreed on the merger, and very recently Lynn has had the agreement approved by the Wake County Fire Commission.
            The merger process will begin July 1 and take two years, Lynn said.
            “The first step is to blend the people,” Lynn said. “They have an excellent group of volunteers, and we want them in our department. We are going to get their people blended in, and then we can run calls in both Wake Forest and Falls.”
            For the time being, the paid daytime staff will remain at the Falls station from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. through the week, with the volunteers covering the nighttime hours and weekends.
            Lynn said the Wake Forest department needs the Falls volunteers. “We have 22 volunteers on the books and 50 paid people with three stations and a ladder truck.” The ladder truck requires a trained crew to operate it, and the department’s third station, Forestville Road, will open soon. Each of the three stations will need firefighters on three shifts around the clock.
            When there is a big fire, or the possibility of one in the area, Wake Forest does not have enough firefighters for the task and calls in Falls and other departments like Stony Hill, Youngsville and Rolesville.
            Station #3 will open with three firefighters on each shift. “We wanted four but the budget wouldn’t stretch.” Lynn said there are nine cadets in the Wake Forest firefighting academy who graduated Friday night. “We’ve got to hire two more people. We started [the class] with eleven.”
            Town Manager Mark Williams said the merger cannot cost the town any money, and Lynn went to the county with a proposal. “We have to have their equipment, and that’s what they agreed on.”
            The Wake Forest department will get two new pumpers, a brush truck, a pickup truck, a Ford Expedition for administrative use and a boat. “We get our fire truck now for our next fire station,” Lynn said. He wanted to keep the Falls station open as Station #4, at least temporarily until they can find a site for that fourth station, “but the county isn’t going to fund it. The county wants to close it to save money.” Lynn said keeping the station open would give them a faster response in that area. The new bridge over the Neuse connecting New Falls of Neuse through Wakefield to Falls of the Neuse Road will help, “but the new bridge won’t help us with the north side.”
            Wake Forest’s current western district boundary is Thompson Mill Road and extends south to include the new Wakefield Baptist Church on Falls of the Neuse Road. “We get a lot of calls there.” Stony Hill Fire Department can get to Thompson Mill Road faster than Wake Forest units can, but the completion of the bypass will change the district lines which are based on the closest district dispatch.
            Without the Falls-Wake Forest merger, Lynn said, the county would have distributed all the equipment. “We don’t know where it would have gone.”
            It was not really feasible for Raleigh to take over the Falls district, Lynn said, because there are no hydrants. The Raleigh trucks carry only 500 gallons but the Wake Forest trucks carry 1,000 gallons. “They would have had to do something different to take over a non-hydrant district. They would have depended on us to bring them tankers. We would have gotten the calls anyway.”
            Later, Lynn said, “I think the Falls thing is going to work out. There is plenty of work for everybody and there will be no cost to the town other than staff time unless we have to get legal representation.” He said the savings from merger should cover any incidental costs – only one entity dealing with workmen’s compensation, not adding any fulltime staff, a discount on multiple vehicles. “We don’t anticipate it costing anybody anything.”
            But that does not mean he is not looking for more money, and he is talking to the county’s Fire/Rescue Division headed by Raymond Echevarria.
            For years the ratio quoted was that the town provided about 78 percent of the independent Wake Forest Fire Department’s budget and the county provided 22 or 23 percent for the rural fire district.
            Instead, Lynn said, the county this year gave the department $352,000, about 10 percent of the $3.8 million budget. “They cannot tell me why except that that’s the way it’s always been. Mark Williams really wants to know why too.”
            Lynn said former fire chief Jerry Swift “would never even talk to them [in the county]. Lynn is currently negotiating with the county officials.
            “We are working to get our funding level to where it should be. They understand now that we are concerned about our funding level.”
            The merger will add four big subdivisions, some with homes worth over a million dollars, and a substantial amount of area. All that property pays a 10-cent-per $100-valuation fire tax to the county to support rural fire departments. The fire tax is applied evenly across all rural property; in the past, there were different taxing levels in different districts which led to a lot of boundary disputes between departments.
            “The residents will never know the difference” once merger is complete, Lynn said. It will take longer for Wake Forest Station #2 to respond, but it is within the county’s established response time which is longer than what Wake Forest requires.