The District is currently in the process of developing the budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Between the current and upcoming budget years, the assessed property valuation of the fire district has been reduced by 36%. The 15% reduction in revenue this current year has created some difficulties in sustaining the maintenance of our fire apparatus and equipment and our volunteer program. We were able to get some grant funding through the Governor’s Office of Economic Recovery that provided support for training, apparatus maintenance and personnel. The upcoming fiscal year creates a whole new set of challenges with a 21% further decline in property values.

As we began our preliminary budget discussion with the Fire Board and the employees, we knew that there would need to be some concessions. Last year we had to implement a pay freeze and no employee received a pay raise. This year, we have asked our employees to give up their holiday pay and take a 30% reduction in the District’s health savings account contributions. We were fortunate that the Firefighter that we hired to cover vacation and sick days has been recently employed by another agency which has helped to eliminate an additional $15,000 in expenses. Our shift personnel will have to trade shifts with each other in order to take vacation days and sick days will be covered by our Assistant Chief. We have also eliminated the supplemental pay (Acting Pay) when an employee is filling in for a higher level position.

With these concessions, we still had a gap in covering our operating costs (such as insurance, utilities, fuel, etc.) and maintaining our personnel costs. Our firefighters are one of the lowest paid in the area and a reduction in salaries would be devastating. Since we only have two full-time personnel responding on an engine, a reduction in force is not a palatable alternative. It would take us backwards and reduce the level of service that we have worked so hard to improve over the years. One of our full-time firefighters supervises all of our fuels projects and we have deemed it necessary to have his salary paid from the fuels grant for the upcoming year.

We are expecting to see a very busy wildland fire season and we will be as aggressive as possible to get our engines assigned and create additional revenues for the District. The need to pursue other sources of revenue was identified early; however, the last two seasons for generating this revenue from wildland fires was slow. We also held a public meeting where many residents opposed a project that was being investigated to provide non-tax revenue to the District by operating a snow-play area and general store. At that meeting, we asked the residents to help us come up with alternatives and none have been offered to date.

Our revenue options being few, a slight increase in the levy rate will be needed to make the budget work in the upcoming year. With the decline in assessed valuations, our taxpayers will still see a reduction in the overall tax liability to the Fire District. We intend for this to be a temporary situation and will make the appropriate reductions as soon as feasible. We have always tried to maintain the lowest levy rate possible to our taxpayers and believe that during these tough economic times that everyone needs to contribute something to maintain the level of public safety that we expect during an emergency.

Based on the Yavapai County data for the upcoming year, the average owner occupied residence in the district was valued at $187,148.38. The secondary assessed valuation (which our district uses for our budget amount) is 10% of that amount or $18,714.84. That property’s tax liability for the upcoming year will be $533.37. Last year the average property valuation was $240,385.60 with a secondary value of $24,038.56 and a tax liability of $600.96. This is an 11.25% decrease in tax liability for the average resident. We are inviting all of your comments to the proposed budget at the May 3rd Board Meeting at 7:30 pm at the fire station. We will discuss the budget concerns and desire to get direct feedback from our residents.

Groom Creek Fire District website