Seaside Fire Department

Voters in November will be asked to renew a five-year local option tax to provide funds for the purchase of a training tower and a training and safety officer for the Seaside Fire Department, a role held by David Rankin.

The levy would replace the current fire levy, which expires at the end of fiscal year 2022-2023, Fire Chief Joey Daniels said.

Losing those funds — a total of $2.3 million — would be a detriment to the city and the fire department, he said, and create a large impact throughout the county. “We happen to be one of the bigger agencies in the county and so we tend to help out our smaller agencies,” he said. “What we do in Seaside also affects the rest of the county and a lot of decisions we make.”

The last operation levy, passed in 2017, approved $2 million over five years for fire equipment and personnel. The new levy will show a decrease from 34 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value to 33 cents per $1,000.

If passed in November, Nov. 8, the new levy would take effect in November 2023.

The current four-story training tower was built in the early 1990s, Daniels said, and has major deterioration.

The new metal tower would enable controlled burns, elevator rescues and ladder truck training.

“We used to burn some acquired structures when people gave us their homes that they didn’t want anymore and they were building something else,” Daniels said.

With homes closer together and legal aspects from potential asbestos and hazardous materials, a tower could provide a controlled, safer environment, Daniels said. “It’s really not that easy, and we don’t want to smoke everybody out when we’re doing it,” he said.

The new tower would provide rooms for fire training and a place to practice ladder truck operations, preventing the need to block off downtown locations for high-rise exercises, he said. “Something you may not know is we do a lot of elevator rescues for such a small city,” he said. “They’ll have a shaft in there that we can do elevator rescues.”

The levy would also fund a replacement for the 2004 tender apparatus, which is seeing increasing maintenance, Daniels said. The new truck would carry 1,800 gallons of water, hose lines and drive on one axle to maximize storage space at the fire station.

The fire department has six full-time employees — a chief, two division chiefs and three firefighters — and about 30 volunteers.

The levy is essential for the department to maintain its national insurance rating, currently among the lowest homeowner insurance ratings in the region, City Manager Mark Winstanley said in June.

The rating is a score provided to fire departments and insurance companies by the Insurance Services Office, which establishes rating information.

“When your ISO rating goes up, everybody’s fire insurance goes up right along with it,” Winstanley said. “In other words, people would end up paying one way or the other. We think it’s a much better approach to have a well-trained, well-equipped fire department with a low ISO rating than it is to have an agency that is more challenged with a higher ISO rating. Once you have it, you really don’t want to give it up and it can go away very quickly.”

City councilors unanimously voted to put the measure on the November ballot.

“This is the greatest investment the property owners and Seaside can make and it’s been proven over the years and the fact that we have a pretty much volunteer-run department,” Mayor Jay Barber said. “Thirty-three cents per $1,000 value is a bargain.”