We hope at least one of the three Wiscasset selectmen who voted against allowing firefighters to wash their personal vehicles at the fire department will quickly reverse their decision.
Just four weeks ago in this space, we wrote about the struggles of Lincoln County fire departments to recruit and retain volunteers and some of their attempts to do so – from a proposal for a 50 percent increase in call and training pay in one town to a proposal for property-tax exemptions in another. We also wrote about the financially disastrous alternatives to volunteer fire departments in a rural county like ours.
By comparison to these perks, if a few volunteers want to hang out at the station and wash their trucks, and if this helps boost morale and keep volunteers on board, Wiscasset’s selectmen and town manager should be doing backflips.
Somewhere along the line, the Wiscasset Board of Selectmen established the policy that the current board is now interpreting as banning a long-standing practice. The current board can just as easily change the policy.
Likewise, the board should reconsider the decision to bar firefighters from filling residents’ swimming pools for insurance reasons.
Surely the town can adjust its insurance policy to allow the firefighters to resume providing this community benefit. If the town’s insurance provider can cover firefighting but not swimming pool-filling, maybe the town should look for a new one.
To pump water into a field instead of into taxpayers’ pools is sheer silliness.
It sounds as if the selectmen were thrust into a delicate position – to either stand by the town manager’s suggestion and a previous board’s policy or overrule both, perhaps without time to fully consider all of the facts.
Now, with time to consider the issue and see the impact of their decision on the community, the selectmen should reverse their decision as soon as possible and avoid an unnecessary divide in the community and the potential loss of hardworking volunteers.
