by Paul Conyers
The Budget Committee had questions for Fire Chief, Scott Tice, at their Nov. 29 meeting, about revenue brought in through the ambulance and EMT service in Hudson. While only accounting for a fraction of the budget, Medicare and insurance payments bring in a small amount of revenue through the service to the town every year, helping offset some costs.
“We are on pace for about $315,000, and we brought in $460,000 last year,” said Committee member, Shawn Jasper.
Tice was unable to say why there was such a difference. One possible reason was COVID-19, another was a backlog in billing paperwork.
“There’s a perpetual backlog, money coming forward with billing, and that plays a part in ambulance revenues,” said Budget Alt-Clerk, Shawn Murray.
After crunching some numbers, the Committee concluded that the difference in ambulance revenue was only slightly below expected numbers and would not make a significant difference.
The Budget Committee got a better picture of finances in town with the proposed warrant articles from the Board of Selectmen. New articles can still come in until early January.
One question raised was about the staffing for the Fire Department.
“I was reading about the recent fire at Hummingbird Lane, and there seemed to be issues. We had ambulances out on calls, and we had minimal staffing to handle the fire,” said Committee member, Kathy Leary. “From what I heard, it sounded like the first response to the fire was the shift commander and another person.”
There were some questions over how much staffing issues were a factor in that particular fire, although Budget Chair, Norm Martin, noted that other nearby towns have larger fire and EMS departments. Several officials also reported that it was common to have Hudson emergency personnel called away.
“There was a full complement of on-duty members, they were just on other calls,” added Selectmen Liaison, Dave Morin. “This is an ongoing problem, it’s going to continue until we can get the money to man this, it’s going to be expensive. They do a good job, and I don’t want to say they got lucky, but we’re going to get caught one of these days.”
It wasn’t clear how many incidents related to staffing occurred. If approved, the warrant article for the Hudson Fire Department would add four new firefighters, enough for one more person at each station.
“Putting one person on each shift really is not going to have that type of an impact,” Committee member, Shawn Jasper, responded. “There will be fires when you will never have enough people there and could never have enough people there.
The Fire Chief has alternatively requested funding for one training officer, a request previously criticized by the Budget Committee, who preferred to use the money to hire more firefighters.
“One more person per shift will make a difference because that will mean we can man an engine company at Central Station with three guys, right now we only man it with two,” said Morin.