Levy sustains service, supports new hires

A drawn out “beep” sounded from inside the ambulance, signaling a call for service.

As the dispatcher rallied off the patient’s details, the crew switched on their lights and sirens and raced toward a local assisted living facility. They arrived in a matter of minutes, assessing and loading the patient for transport. From establishing that first contact to reaching the hospital door was under an hour.

This type of rapid response from the Bigfork Fire Department is what the village by the bay has come to rely on. However, as of just a couple years ago, that speedy service was in jeopardy. The department watched its pool of volunteers dwindle while calls for service continued to rise. They began paying staff to ensure 24/7 coverage, but didn’t have the budget to sustain that, nor could the department guarantee a paramedic on staff around the clock.

“This is not sustainable,” Fire Chief Mark Thiry said. “We have to go to the voters or bad things are going to happen. Services may be cut. Who knows.”

Call volume has more than doubled since 2010, jumping from 316 calls that year to 880 in 2018, and peaking in 2017 with 923 calls for service. The department is consistently the most busy during the summer months — last year, they responded to 104 calls in July alone, more than double their slowest month of March which had 42 calls. To date this year, the most calls received by the department in a single day was 12 during a high-wind event on Aug. 10, but they’ve had two other 24-periods where they received 10 calls or more.

With demand on the upswing, Bigfork Fire asked the community for help rather than risk the degradation of their fire and medical services. While 39% of funding for Bigfork Fire comes from EMS revenue, the majority, or 57%, is sourced from taxpayer dollars.

In May of 2018, Bigfork taxpayers approved a 15-mill levy increase, generating an additional $350,000 annually for the department and QRU, by a vote of 771 to 371. The post-levy budget stands at $1.57 million, with 30% required to remain in cash reserves for the following year.

At the time, the chief said the levy funds would allow the department to hire adequate staff and to pay its employees a fair wage.

Now, a year and a half later, Thiry said the community’s support has paid off.

“If it wasn’t for the levy and we couldn’t pay people to stand by here, you would have to wait for someone to come from home and that would have delayed response,” Thiry explained. “By having them full time, they have a consistent schedule, standard of care consistency, working together consistency. We’ve already seen a great improvement in our service that we’re delivering.”

The department is now able to staff a paramedic 24/7 — a medical professional with at least 1,200 of training compared to the 120-150 hours a basic EMT has. They’ve also hired three full-time personnel, bringing the department’s total to 10. Those full-time additions have resulted in greater consistency in scheduling and increased familiarity among the staff themselves. When they come on shift, employees know who they’re working with, along with the strengths and weaknesses of that person, which can be critical in fast-moving emergency situations.

“They get to know each other, know how each other works,” said Deputy Fire Chief Jeremy Patton. “I’ll say within the past couple months, I’ve really started to notice a lot of that happening — crew integrity, just being able to accomplish more tasks.”

Staff have also seen a modest increase in pay, bringing them slightly below the average wage for similar personnel in this part of Montana, Thiry said.

“Prior to that [levy] we were paying minimum wage, $8.50 an hour,” he said. “Our people have to make a living.”

In addition to growing staff, the department has been able to develop a long-range plan to replace equipment, which can easily reach into the hundreds of thousands for a new engine or ambulance.

“By the time we have a need to replace a vehicle, the money will be sitting there. We won’t have to borrow,” Thiry said.

The Bigfork Fire Department and QRU serves a substantial area, including Bigfork, Ferndale, half of Creston and along the Flathead Lake to mile marker 18 and down Hwy. 83, sometimes as far as Condon. The department’s calls are mostly medical — Patton estimates around 80 percent, while the remainder of their responses are fire-related. Daily call volume varies widely — on any given day, their pagers might be silent or they could be running more than half a dozen calls.

One thing that has been consistent is the support the department has received from the community, Patton said.

“The community itself, they are very big supporters of the fire department. Anytime they hear that there is any kind of need that the fire department has, the community steps up,” Patton said. “When we asked for the levy, it easily passed and I think that says a lot.” ¦

Editor Mackenzie Reiss can be reached at (406) 758-4433 or editor@bigforkeagle.com.