PROVINCETOWN — At the April 7 town meeting, voters will decide on a proposed $1.4-million operating override that would expand the leadership ranks of the fire dept. and pay for higher wage rates and overtime in both the fire and police depts.
Most of the money — $1.1 million — is for the fire dept., which has been transitioning over the last two years from an all-volunteer force supplemented by outside ambulance services into an in-house Fire and EMS Dept. with both career and volunteer firefighters.
The override would add four fire captains to the roster — experienced people who could “provide enhanced leadership and supervision on the fire ground” and “improve response time and decision making,” Othaine Rance, the department’s Emergency Medical Services coordinator and acting deputy fire chief, told the Independent this week.
The override would also add a full-time fire chief and deputy fire chief to the department.
Chief Jimmy Roderick is currently paid at the part-time rate of $69,000, while the full-time fire chiefs in Truro and Wellfleet are paid $154,000 and $157,000 respectively. Roderick is set to retire in March 2026 when he turns 65, and the override would fund a new, higher salary from that point forward.
Rance said he has been acting as both EMS coordinator and deputy fire chief, but the override would split the positions and fund a full-time salary for a deputy chief.
“The first 10 minutes of any fire are crucial,” said Rance. “The hiring of captains, especially experienced ones, is necessary to bridge any significant leadership gaps.”
Many of the department’s 16 firefighter-paramedics and firefighter-EMTs were hired from the Lower Cape Ambulance Association (LCAA) when that organization collapsed in 2023, Rance said. Most of them have years of medical experience but do not have “specific, high-level experience on the fire ground,” Rance said, which the four new captains would provide.
The $295,000 designated for the police dept. would not add any new positions there but is largely a response to successful recruitment and retention, Town Manager Alex Morse told the select board on Jan. 27. There have been fewer vacancies on the roster than is typical, “so there have been less surplus funds from empty positions that we had once been able to count on transferring to the overtime line,” Morse said.
A Combination Department
This year’s operating override would be the second in three years for the fire dept.
The precipitating event for the first override, a $1-million vote in April 2023, was the dissolution of LCAA, which was announced in January of that year and became effective that September. That override funded eight full-time firefighter-paramedic and firefighter-EMT positions in the department — the first firefighters in the department’s history to be “career,” or full-time, rather than “call,” or volunteer, firefighters.
After LCAA ceased operations in September 2023, the town repurposed the $1 million per year it had been paying to the company for ambulance services and about $600,000 in new ambulance receipts to fund another 12 hires, according to Morse’s Jan. 27 budget presentation to the select board.
That brought the department to a headcount of 20: four people who are paramedics only and 16 who are firefighter-paramedics or firefighter-EMTs, Rance said. The town also employs several part-time or “standby” paramedics, many of whom work for other towns but like to pick up extra shifts, Rance said.
Under the new organization plan, the full-time personnel will be organized into four groups, each led by a full-time captain, Rance said. The town’s volunteer firefighters will be organized into four squads that will each practice alongside one of the groups.
“We’re trying to have the department be half-and-half, so we can staff half our units with career personnel and call out to staff the remaining half in case of a serious incident,” Rance said.
The town’s planned response for a structure fire involves all four fire engines, the ladder truck, and an ambulance, and to get six pieces of equipment to a fire means the town still needs volunteer firefighters.
“You cannot schedule staff to all the seat positions you have in your trucks — it’s not financially feasible,” said Rance. On a typical day there will be eight staff in the station, not counting the chiefs, and that’s enough to move only three or four pieces of equipment to the scene.
“Most departments will do a full-staff callback during an incident,” meaning off-duty firefighters join the response — but with many of the Outer Cape’s career firefighters living in Harwich or even farther away, that won’t work for Provincetown either, he said.
“This is the impetus in trying to save the call department,” Rance said. “If you put out a call and 16 call people come in, along with one or two career people who live close by, you can staff all your equipment” without having to double the number of people working each shift and paying the associated costs, he said.
Training Up
The town had 49 volunteer firefighters last spring, but after a confrontation between Morse and then-Fire Chief Mike Trovato culminated in Trovato’s resignation in June, more than half of the volunteer department quit. Trovato claimed he had been “pushed out the door,” and 18 volunteer firefighters told the select board on June 24 that they felt the chief had been treated with “extreme disrespect.”
By November, the call department was down to 22 people, Rance said.
To help keep the remaining volunteers, the town organized a five-month training program at the fire station that took place on Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings, Rance said. Twelve volunteer firefighters and another five EMTs or paramedics finished the 160-hour course and will take their “Firefighter 1 and 2” exams this month.
Another 10 people have signed up as volunteer firefighters since November, nine of whom will need to go through the next round of training, Rance said. Now that the Barnstable Fire Academy has closed and the nearest fire academy is in Bridgewater, it’s important to offer training locally, he added.
“If someone already works for the town DPW, how are they going to find time to commit to a September-to-January training and drive to a facility that’s off-Cape?” Rance asked. “You can’t just switch to an all-career department,” so the challenge is to “get the call department and the career department to feel valued the same.”
