WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Fire District on Tuesday night approved a $582,000 tax bill that represents a 4.24 percent decrease from the fiscal year 2016 appropriation.

 

The three-person Prudential Committee that oversees the district faced a number of questions but no dissenting votes from the dozen or so residents who attended the annual Fire District meeting at the Water Street station.

 

Most of the questions centered on Article 5 of the eight-article warrant, the item that deals with the operations budget for the district.

 

The omnibus budget is up by about 3 percent for FY17, from $474,710 in the current fiscal year to $488,915 for the year that begins July 1.

 

The committee was asked about its rationale for a number of line item increases, including a 69 percent increase in the "management services" line item, which goes up from $8,000 to $13,500. Although it represents less than 3 percent of the total budget, it accounts for 39 percent of the increase to the operations budget.

 

"The majority of that [management services item] is paid back to the town for doing tax collections and all that service work," explained Corydon Thurston, the district's clerk/treasurer and moderator.

 

In addition, the district has moved some money out of its maintenance and operations line item to the management line item to more accurately reflect how the money is being spent, Thurston explained.

 

Maintenance and operations, or M&O, is one of the larger portions of the budget, at $50,000, unchanged from last year.

 

Prudential Committee member Ed Briggs, who was re-elected to the committee in secret balloting before Tuesday's annual meeting, noted that the district might have seen a dividend in M&O were it not for the fact that maintenance costs continue to skyrocket.

 

"We can't repair the trucks locally," Briggs said. "They have to be repaired, for the most part, by the manufacturer."

 

While in days past, the firefighters could do a lot of the maintenance work on the trucks themselves, today's more sophisticated machines require specialized maintenance.

 

"You know what electronics is — it's money," Prudential Committee Chairman John Notsley said. "When it comes to the pumps and electronics in these vehicles, they have to send a man from the factory, or, in certain cases, we have to send a truck down there [to Connecticut]."

 

Another factor weighing on the upkeep of the trucks: wear and tear from winter roads.

 

Notsley said that ice melting materials used on the roads is wreaking havoc on the undercarriages of the district's trucks — and warned attendees that it is doing the same thing to their cars.

 

"We spray them underneath every time we come back from a call, but in a lot of places they have a machine that goes under the trucks to hose them down," Notsley said.

 

Thurston noted that if the district ever is able to build a new fire station, one of its features likely will be a well under the truck bay to facilitate undercarriage maintenance.

 

The prospect of a new station was raised from the floor of the meeting, when resident Dan Gendron asked the committee what it plans to do moving forward to cooperate with the town on a public safety building project.

 

Notsley reiterated the committee's position that the best location for any public safety facility is the Main Street parcel that the district twice tried to purchase. Both times, the proposal received a majority vote of the town's voters but not the two-thirds "super majority" needed for passage.

 

"As my father used to tell me, they're not making any more land, and they don't make any more land in the center of Williamstown, which is where it should be located," Notsley said.

 

Charles Fox, a member of the town's Public Safety Building Study Committee, told the meeting from the floor that he believes that group will reconvene early this month to continue looking at options for a combined police/fire facility.

 

Unlike the police force, which is a department of town government, the fire district is a separate governmental entity with its own taxing authority, which is why the district's annual meeting is held apart from the annual town meeting, held earlier in May.

 

Twenty-nine ballots were cast in the annual fire district election. Briggs received 27 votes with two write-ins. Thurston was elected with 28 votes (one write-in) for clerk/treasurer and 28 votes for moderator.