The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors is set to meet with the county’s seven fire chiefs just prior to the board’s regular May meeting to discuss potential increases in county donations to the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) side of Meherrin Volunteer Fire & Rescue and to the fire and EMS sides of Hampden-Sydney Volunteer Fire Department.

At the board’s regular April meeting Tuesday, Prince Edward County Administrator Wade Bartlett said, “The board discussed having a meeting with the fire chiefs on either the 16th or the 23rd. That didn’t work out. There were some people that could not meet on those two days. We’re looking now at doing that at 5:30 p.m. before our next regular board meeting, which is May 14.”

Board members agreed to this date and time.

The meeting will follow the April 30 meeting when the board is scheduled to adopt the Fiscal Year 2020 county and school budgets and tax rates, but Bartlett did not expect this to be a problem.

“This is something that we can always amend our budget (for) even if we have approved it by that time, which we’re scheduled to approve it before, but we’re not talking about a large amount of money that would necessitate another public hearing,” he said.

Farmville 701 District Supervisor and Board Chairman Jim Wilck explained the idea behind the meeting with the fire chiefs.

“The other chiefs can hear what’s being discussed,” he said. “Nothing’s going on under the table, or we’re not making any special deals or anything like that. We’ll go, probably, with what they suggest. We’ll certainly take a vote, but we’ll listen to what everybody has to say.”

Hampden-Sydney Chief L.W. Gilliam described his department’s request for additional funding.

“A certain percentage of it was for the fire side, and the other percentage was for our EMS side, so it wasn’t all just for the fire department,” he said.

He cited a trio of reasons for why the department was requesting an increase in funds, speaking first about its volunteer base.

“We do have about 90 percent student base,” he said. “We also rely on local people, but unfortunately we don’t have as many local people as we do students, so we’re still 90 percent students, 10 percent local members. That being said, we do have high turnover rate every year because we have seniors graduate, and we take in new people, and our training costs are high. But also the equipment maintenance and the cost of operating a fire department has gone up tremendously.”

“That and also our call volume,” he continued. “Our call volume has skyrocketed in the last few years. So it’s not just the fact that we have so much turnover of people. We kind of have three different things going on at one time that it’s just time to ask for an increase.”

Getting specific on the call volume for his department, he said that from last year to this year, it has increased more than 81 percent.

“We’ve had some protocol changes in the county, but it’s just call load through everybody,” he said. “Everybody’s been picking up in the last three years. The calls that we ran in 2015 compared to what we ran in 2018 is a crazy amount of difference.”

Call volume was also a reason cited by Meherrin Fire Chief Trey Pyle for why his department was asking for more funds.

He also made clear that his department’s request pertained only to EMS.

“We’re not looking for an increase on the fire side at all,” he said. “We’re happy with what we’re getting from Prince Edward County. We’re just asking for a little bit of money on the EMS side.”

He noted that EMS is a separate line item in the county budget.

“The fire departments, we usually act as one in Prince Edward,” he said. “Any request we put in for funding is usually done as an association. The EMS has always been put aside separately, and us, Prince Edward, Pamplin and Hampden-Sydney EMS have always been funded separately …”

Pyle said the Meherrin request for additional funds is a two-part request.

“The first request was just for an additional $5,000 in operational money,” he said. “Basically that’s just due to increase in call volume. It’s pretty cut and dry. Our call volume … I believe it’s like 78 percent increase over last year. So we saw a huge increase in call volume, which I believe increases our operational cost. So we were just looking for a little bit of help from Prince Edward to offset some of that.”

The second part of the request is to start what Pyle is calling a vehicle acquisition fund, which could be a completely new line item.

“I think they’ve named it something else now, but basically money that is set aside for us to use to purchase an ambulance when we decide to buy one in the future,” he said. “Currently, the only money we’ve ever received from Prince Edward County to buy any ambulances was in 2001. They gave us $10,000, which was a match from Prince Edward and Lunenburg to buy our first unit. Since then, we don’t receive any money from Prince Edward County to purchase ambulances, so we’re purchasing those either by grant or out of pocket.”

“Basically, the way it would break down is with our rotation we have going on between purchasing years, they would purchase about one-third of that unit for us every time we bought one,” he continued. “So nothing drastic. Ours is just strictly due to call volume and just trying to plan for the future. We’re trying to be proactive and not reactive on a potential issue moving on.”

Pyle said the request is for $12,000 annually for the vehicle acquisition fund, money which he said would stay with the county until the department signed a contract.

“Most of the time what happens is if you have a vehicle fund like that, you use it to make a payment yearly,” he said.

In this case, he is not expecting purchases to be this frequent, meaning the fund could build up significantly, maybe even to $70,000-plus depending on how many years it was between purchases.

“And we would make one down payment on the unit, and then Prince Edward would start building their fund back up for us again,” he said.

Summarizing county funds as they relate to Meherrin’s EMS side, Pyle said, “We get $13,000 operational. We get nothing to buy ambulances with. So we’re asking for an additional $5,000 this year, which would take us to $18,000, and we’re asking to start the vehicle fund at $12,000 per year.”