MORGANTOWN — A mysterious jack-o-lantern that sounded suspiciously like Morgantown Deputy Mayor Rachel Fetty opened Tuesday’s Morgantown City Council Committee of the Whole Session with a request — be safe and observe COVID-19 protocols if you participate in trick-or-treat on Saturday.
Once down to business, council touched on a number of issues, most notably the creation of a new way to calculate the city’s fire fees based at least partially on risk assessment as opposed to solely square footage.
Fire Chief Mark Caravasos explained that the change is very much a work in progress is still likely a year from implementation as it requires a tremendous amount of data collection.
Once the department has up-to-date square footage information from the county assessor’s office, the process of providing OVAP (Occupancy Vulnerability Assessment Profile) scores will begin, likely starting with the city’s commercial structures.
Based on a whole host of factors ranging from the number of employees/inhabitants to distance from other structures and fire hydrants to the presence of flammable chemicals and materials, each structure will be given a score — from low to maximum risk — that could serve as a multiplier in determining fire fee rates.
Caravasos explained that the current rate structure has been in place since the early 1980s and only looks at square footage.
“It doesn’t look at what happens in a building,” Caravasos said. “Regardless of what the structure is used for, all structures are charged a flat rate per square foot. So you have residential homes paying more than hazardous storage commercial structures in fire service fees.”
Council asked Caravasos to take a look at the city’s fee structure last summer as a means of supporting firefighter positions added through a federal SAFER grant.
The $1.7 million grant was awarded in 2017 and has funded 12 firefighters on a diminishing scale the past three years. The grant allowed the department to add personnel for the first time since 1968.
While the grant was originally programmed to run out next month, Caravasos said he’s applying to FEMA for remaining unused grant dollars that would fund the positions through October 2021.
The city implemented a 23% increase in fire fees as a part of its current budget in order to keep the positions in place. Even so, fire fees only provide about 60% of the department’s budget.
Moving to this method, Caravasos said, would shift the burden of fees more heavily toward the structures that present the greatest threat to the community and the largest challenge to the fire department.
He explained that 93% of the structures in the city will likely fall into a “moderate risk” category, noting that of the 320 structures in the city for which OVAP scores are in place, nine are low risk, 299 are moderate risk, nine are significant risk and three are maximum risk.
“To me, it seems like a very reasonable approach. I know we don’t really know what the outcome is going to be, but I think in terms of the method and the process, it seems like a very reasonable one to me,” Mayor Ron Dulaney said.
