MAPLETON – A new firefighter wage policy has been approved to standardize wages between Mapleton, Minto and Wellington North.
Mapleton firefighters were previously paid based on a points system, but will now receive an hourly wage like the firefighters in Minto and Wellington North.
The policy was reviewed and approved by all the township’s firefighters, with no one objecting.
“They had their say and seem to be very happy with it,” fire chief Chris Harrow told Mapleton council on April 22.
Firefighters will be paid $23 per hour, other than the first hour of an incident, for which they will be paid $46.
For weekend standby pay, they will receive $85 per day.
The rates are set to increase based on cost-of-living increases every Jan. 1.
The overall payroll budget will depend on the number of incidents, training sessions and public events attended by firefighters.
Mapleton council adopted the proposed wage policy on April 22 and directed staff to implement it retroactively as of Dec. 1 – the beginning of the firefighters’ current pay period.
The firefighters will be paid biannually, which Harrow said “is good for treasury and good for us too, to be able to know where we stand in June and then what we need to expect for the last half of the year.”
Councillor Michael Martin asked about the weekend standby pay, noting, “I know the folks over in Minto used to have to hang out in town over particular weekends of the month. Here in Mapleton we were free to come and go as we pleased.”
Harrow said “there is still no standby in Mapleton,” but it’s something firefighters here have been discussing, particularly for long weekends and special events.
“We have a young department and they like to travel,” Harrow said.
“So this is just here so that they know if we do have to put an on-call crew on that they are compensated appropriately.”
Council passed the pay policy unanimously.
During the same meeting, Harrow gave a presentation about options for different levels of service provided by fire departments.
He said a master fire plan with recommendations is expected to come before council in May.
Harrow explained municipalities are not obligated to have fire departments, as long as they provide public education on fire safety, fire inspections including smoke alarm programs, and community risk assessments.
“If you don’t have a fire department, you have to appoint a community fire safety officer” to cover the above responsibilities, Harrow noted, “but that doesn’t apply to us because we’ve already chosen to do a fire department.
“If you do a fire department you have to provide some sort of fire suppression services,” he added, which could involve exterior firefighting only or could involve interior fire suppression too.
“There are lots of departments up north that are choosing to go exterior only, where you just surround the building that’s on fire and you put water on it and you suppress it that way. You are, under no circumstances in that case, allowed to go inside a building no matter what,” he said.
“Your role as council is to pick the level of service that we as the fire department offer to our citizens.”
Harrow said the decision is informed by a community risk assessment document that includes hazard identification, risk assessment and analysis, risk tolerance and historical call types and volumes.
“There should always be data and there should always be rationale behind why we are doing each thing,” Harrow said, and this document, completed by the fire management team, provides that data and rationale.
Council will direct the fire department about the level of service to provide, and then the fire department will return to council with what it will cost to offer those services, including staffing, training, apparatus and equipment.
Harrow said the fire department strongly recommends council continue with the following services:
- general firefighting;
- apparatus and vehicle pumping;
- interior and exterior suppression;
- traffic control;
- dangerous goods and hazardous materials;
- medical first response; and
- responding to alarms including carbon monoxide.
Harrow said most small volunteer fire departments like Mapleton’s do not offer speciality rescue services such as water rescue, confined space rescue, high angle, hazardous materials operations or trench rescue anymore “because the training that’s involved for personnel is so comprehensive that it’s very tough to get everybody trained.”
But he noted council can ask the department to explore these services “and we would take it back and give you reports back on what it would take and whether we could actually handle it.”
Choosing which services to include is a balancing act, Harrow noted, between “what the municipality can afford and what the residents need.”
He said it’d be great to offer every kind of speciality rescue, like departments in Mississauga and Toronto do, “we just know that’s not a reality, unfortunately.”
The level of service offered in Mapleton can be supplemented through agreements with other departments, Harrow noted, including mutual aid agreements, automatic aid agreements and fire protection agreements.
Mapleton, Minto and Wellington North fire services have agreements with Centre Wellington, North Perth, Waterloo Region and Guelph.
The agreements mean Mapleton residents will have access to specialty rescue services, though they may take longer to get to them, and “as a municipality our liability is covered as we do have someone that will provide services,” Harrow said.
Many of the fire department’s recommendations are based on liability risk-mitigation, Harrow noted.
“That’s why we got rid of our water rescue – because we knew we weren’t … properly trained, and we were saying we were offering a service that we can’t offer and that was putting us out for a huge liability.”
It’s why they stopped offering confined space rescue services, too, he noted. “Our equipment and training was not up to snuff so we had to back off that.”
Councillor Lori Woodham asked Harrow if local firefighters are interested in completing water rescue training, noting, “I’ve heard that it’s many, many hours that they would have to commit to.”
“They would love to do all the services,” Harrow said. “They want to and they are very keen … [but] I’ve been around in the chief position for 20 years and I know when you’re young and you’re keen and you’re excited you want to do all this stuff, but then five years comes along and you get married and have kids” and have much less availability.
“And then we’re no longer able to offer that service … it’s a long-term commitment – it’s not just right now. The firefighters understand that and they agree,” he said.
“Our mentality right now with the training is we’re focusing on basics. We’re getting our basics covered and we want to get really good at the basics. Then we’re going to look at what else we can progress to.”
