Vale council restructures fire, ambulance chain of command
By Katie Pizza
Argus Observer
Tuesday, September 2, 2008 10:19 AM PDT
Vale — The Vale City Council restructured the Vale Fire and Ambulance Department chain of command, heard pay concerns from a member of the Vale Ambulance Department, received an incident report summary from the Malheur County Sheriff’s Office, discussed renting City Hall office space to the circuit court and approved payment for a new, but used, truck purchase for the city’s public works fleet at its meeting last week.
Karlene Keller, of the Vale Ambulance Department, said her primary concern involved on-call payment, which she said should be $2 an hour. She found fault with the current payment system, which only paid ambulance workers for time spent responding to a call. This payment, she said, would solve a lot of problems in the department, such as low morale and a lack of volunteers.
Vale City Manager Brent Barton presented an overview of time ambulance department members spend at community events unpaid. These events, which included the Fourth of July Parade and Rodeo, high school varsity and junior varsity football games and the Vale Easter egg hunt, totaled 297 manhours, which at $2 an hour, would add up to $594. However, that number would change if any of the events included an incident that required emergency care. This number also did not include events such as middle school football and Halloween events, each of which have varying hours and crew sizes.
“They’re difficult to put a finger on,” Barton said.
City Councilman Brian Zanotelli said he believed the ambulance team should be paid for time spent at rodeos and football games but did not feel the same on-call pay should apply when the ambulance worker in question was on-call at home. Mayor Bill Lawrence said the $2-an-hour on-call pay issue should be tabled until the council could learn if the money was in the budget and if it was legal to spend money that had not yet been budgeted for this use.
However, the council did vote to combine the Vale fire and ambulance departments into one entity, headed by Fire and Ambulance Chief Todd Hesse. This move, Councilman Brad Williams said, will allow the two departments to work together and have a clearer chain of command, which would run from Hesse, to Barton, to the council. The council also discussed moving Hesse into an office inside City Hall. This office was also discussed as the potential location of regional circuit court tech supervisor Vickie Kugler’s new office.
Barton said Kugler is currently working across the parking lot in the Malheur County Courthouse, but she does not have much space and has few options because the information she processes needs to be kept confidential. The council voiced their support for the potential move, asserting moving Hesse into the former police chief’s office was also an option.
The council also heard from Malheur County Undersheriff Brian Wolfe regarding the amount of Vale calls processed since the beginning of the year — 1,012. Wolfe said he has seen an increase in identity theft, with three incidents reported since January. Wolfe also spoke about how Vale has responded to increased gang activity in the past. Wolfe said gang members were under the impression Vale was a safe haven for gang activity since they believed there were few deputies patrolling the area. This caused the sheriff’s office to increase walking and biking patrols in the area, since those two modes of transportation are harder to spot, in an effort to dispel that theory.
“They decided (Vale) wasn’t big enough for the both of us,” he said. “And we weren’t leaving.”
Noticeably absent from the agenda was a proposed Lifeways secure residential treatment facility. This facility, which, if approved, would house eight mentally ill patients from across Oregon, was slated to appear again before the Planning and Zoning Commission Aug. 25, with the board planning to make a decision regarding the structure’s creation. However, the meeting was canceled after Barton learned the first public hearing on the subject could not take place until 45 days after he submitted paperwork detailing a potential rezoning of the property from commercial to either residential or public facility to the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development. City code, he said, presented a different timeline, which would require a revamp of that language in a later council session.
“The code is not in conjunction with the state requirements,” Barton said. “We’re going to have to change it.”
For the time being, Barton said he plans to mail out the necessary paperwork and then organize a public hearing on the issue sometime in October, after the 45 days have passed. The first hearing, he said, was voided by the procedural issue.
