By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
WALDPORT – The board of the Central Coast Fire & Rescue District has approved seeking a loan for up to $800,000 to help it meet expenses from July through November and to begin making repairs to its deteriorating station in downtown Waldport.
It is the first time the district has taken out a loan against future property taxes as an eight-year-old operations levy loses ground to inflation and increasing costs of everything from salaries, to insurance to the cost of fuel and repairs.
“We anticipated this. It’s not something we didn’t see coming,” Chief Jamie Mason told YachatsNews before a Thursday meeting where the COCF&R board approved its 2024-25 budget and the loan resolution. “We could have asked for a bigger levy in 2020 but nobody was going to vote for a bigger levy during the pandemic.”
So now the district says it has to borrow money to pay expenses between July and November, when yearly property taxes begin flowing in. While the district expects to have a cash carryover of $242,000 when its 2024-25 fiscal year begins Monday, it wants to keep that in reserve for emergencies.
Before approving the loan resolution Thursday evening, the COCF&R board approved its 2024-25 budget of $1.5 million, up from the 2023-24 budget of $1.2 million.
As with almost all budgets, the biggest cost is for personnel – everything from salaries, to medical insurance, to retirement funding and to overtime pay. That accounts for $966,200 in the district’s budget. Mason says the district is seeing big jumps in its insurance costs and payments to the state’s retirement plan that went from $84,000 in 2023-24 to $131,00 in the new fiscal year.
The district is budgeting $595,500 on salaries for its six firefighters and three office staff in 2024-25, which includes a 5 percent salary increase for its unionized firefighters. Even with that, Mason said, the district’s firefighter pay now lags behind other coastal agencies and can lead to staff leaving for higher-paying jobs – as two did recently.
A first-year firefighter in Waldport is paid $47,800 a year, rising to $60,400 after five years. A fire captain starts at $57,400 and tops out at $72,600.
“We’re not anywhere close to comparable to other departments now,” Mason said. “Our people want to work here, but they also want to pay bills.”
Fixes for aging station
The Central Coast district has three sources of income from property taxes. They are:
- A permanent tax rate of 82 cents per $1,000 assessed property value that is expected to generate $381,500 in fiscal 2024-25;
- An operations levy of 35 cents per $1,000 assessed property value that is expected to generate $162,600 in fiscal 2024-25. Voters approved a 10 cent increase of it in 2022;
- And, an operations levy of $1.27 per $1,000 assessed property value that is expected to generate $590,200 in fiscal 2024-25. It was established in 2016 and renewed – but not increased — by voters in 2020.
Because the $1.27 levy has been the same since it was approved eight years ago, for the first time the district expects to run short of operations money in late July and into November when property taxes begin arriving. Then it will repay the amount used – until the following summer when it needs money again.
Although the root causes are different, COCF&R’s situation is similar to the Yachats fire district’s where it was forced to borrow up to $400,000 a year for four years to make ends meet during the summer. That practice only ended last year when voters approved a new, larger operations levy.
Mason said COCF&R’s loans would end in June 2026 if the district can convince voters to approve a new levy.
While the board on Thursday authorized up to a $800,000 from a Texas organization that loans money to local governments, $300,000 would be available to use as needed to pay bills until November. The rest would be parked in a state investment pool and used as necessary to make repairs to the downtown Waldport station.
The interest rate on the loan is expected to be 3 percent, Mason said.
The district has been trying to find a solution – or an alternative – to the station that it is buying from the city of Waldport for $1.02 million with a balloon payment due in 2028. But finding up to $14 million to build a new station out of the tsunami zone isn’t feasible, so it is trying to extend the life of the current building until it finds grants, possibly money from Congress, and potentially a voter-approved bond to remodel it.
Until then, board member Jon MacCulloch said Thursday that the district should use the additional money from the loan “and start whittling away on repairs that will give us another 5-7 years out of the current building.”
“We’ve been stagnant on getting much-needed work done on this building before the next storm season,” MacCulloch said, pointing to faulty bay doors, a leaking roof and primitive firefighter quarters.
Board member Zach Akin initially expressed discomfort with adding repair money to the bridge loan for operations, wondering if the district should first ask taxpayers for money to fix the station.
But office manager Wendy Rush Knudsen said a recent postcard survey of district residents on possible station solutions indicated that a lot more education needed to be done on the district’s financial issues and ideas for a new or remodeled station. She said sentiment from 65 returned postcards indicated people want to keep the station downtown and are not willing to pay for much of anything.
MacCulloch proposed that the district only pull from the repair fund for specific, board-approved projects – and the board agreed to that.
“We need to be very careful with what the money is used for,” he said. “We have some things with this building that we have to tackle. We can’t kick that can down the road anymore.”
The board approved the loan resolution 4-0. Board member Rick Booth was absent.
- Quinton Smith is the editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com