MIDDLEPORT — Village residents have voted to approve a benefits program for senior volunteer firefighters.
Residents voted in favor of implementing the state-sanctioned Length of Service Award Program (LOSAP) for senior members of all-volunteer Middleport Fire Department in a 135-68 vote Tuesday.
“It’s one less challenge off our plate,” Fire Chief Ryan Czaja said.
Similar to a retirement program for volunteer firefighters, LOSAP provides compensation to members aged 65 years and older based on years of service with their fire company. The compensation is paid by property owners in the fire district.
The goal is to encourage volunteer firefighters to serve longer with their company as membership numbers have continued to fall.
“We think this is the best and the most legitimate recruitment and retention tool that we have available to us,” MFD firefighter and past president Darren Burdick said.
Starting Jan. 1, senior members of MFD will be eligible to receive monthly payments.
The amount that a firefighter gets paid per month is based on a system of points earned for their length and extent of service with the fire company. A firefighter is eligible to receive benefits once they turn 65 and can receive up to $400 per month.
The estimated annual cost of the program in the Middleport fire district is approximately $70,000 for the first 10 years, and involvement in it could lead to an estimated $1.27 per thousand increase in the village tax rate.
However, Mayor Dan Dodge said the village plans to enter an inter-municipal agreement with the Town of Royalton, which recently adopted LOSAP for three of its fire districts, to share LOSAP administration duties. The agreement would lower the increase in the village tax rate to 53 cents per thousand.
Per New York state law, the lower rate could not appear on the ballot since the inter-municipal agreement could not be made until the village passed its own referendum.
The village board voted twice on the question of holding the LOSAP referendum. The first resolution, in September, failed on a 2-1 vote and Dodge, who cast the “no” vote, said he thought the village should wait until 2024 to hold a referendum, due to concern about the cost to implement the program.
However, at the urging of the fire department and village residents, Dodge said he decided to reintroduce the referendum resolution, which was passed unanimously at the October board meeting.
“From the beginning I was never against it,” Dodge said. “I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood what was going on. So it was advertised enough and it was talked about enough that I’m pretty sure that everybody knew what they were voting on.”
Over the past two months, fire department members launched a campaign to make village residents more aware of LOSAP. Burdick believes that the information campaign played a significant role in the referendum passing.
“I’ve said since the beginning, we believe that if we educated the public and the facts of what the situation is in the volunteer fire service and what the cost was, that they would support us and vote yes. In the end, it came out the way I thought it would,” Burdick said.