Sunset • On paper, Sunset has its fire department back. In practice, nothing has changed.
The Sunset City Council voted Tuesday night to confirm the appointment of North Davis Fire District Chief Mark Becraft as the head of the Sunset Fire Department. The move was approved by four council members, with member Scott Wiggill abstaining.
Sunset has contracted with North Davis to provide fire protection since June. The town shuttered its volunteer fire department that month, following equipment failures that led to the death of a former mayor and his wife.
The Tuesday decision to name Becraft as the head of Sunset’s department — while the city actually receives fire protection from the North Davis Fire District — angered many of the 24 citizens in attendance, and some claimed the move was crooked.
“Your measures have been illegal from the beginning,” said resident Tyler Argyle. “When are you guys going to quit your illegal activities and listen to the will of the people?”
“You tax me to heck and back again, and you give our money to another county,” resident Linda Knight told the council Tuesday.
In making the change, the City Council had reasoned that updating equipment and renovating an aging fire station would be too much of a tax burden. The initial decision drew heated opposition during a June city council meeting. Residents circulated a petition calling for a referendum on the change, and it garnered about 420 signatures. In the last Sunset election, 758 ballots were cast.
Mayor Beverly Macfarlane said the referendum will face a vote in 2019, but in the meantime, the city needs fire protection. Citizens at Tuesday’s meeting called for a special election to hurry the process, but the council declined to expedite the vote.
Lisa Watts Baskin, an attorney hired by the residents who circulated the petition, said the city could hold a special election as early as June. She said Macfarlane is using the situation as an excuse to bring in outside fire protection.
“In my mind, and under the law, you have twisted the law to avoid the impact of the referendum, which is a state constitutional right,” Watts Baskin told the mayor and council.
J. Craig Smith, an attorney hired by the city to look into the legality of the appointment of Becraft, said that in his view, the move is legal because the referendum hasn’t been voted on yet.
The decision to close the fire department came as the council was considering a roads project for 2018 and a tighter budget after an RV dealership moved out — taking its property taxes with it.
In addition, the city’s fire department needed new engines and a new fire station, a funding challenge for a community of 5,200 people on land a mile long and a half-mile wide.
“What do you do, double peoples’ taxes so you can bring on full-time personnel and buy new equipment when you’ve got another department at your back door?” Councilman Chad Bangerter asked during a recent interview with The Salt Lake Tribune.
In addition to responding to emergencies for 61 years, the fire department had hosted Easter Egg hunts and cancer walks and had raised funds for various causes — including for Sunset residents who lost possessions in fires.
“We’ve always been pretty active in the community,” said former interim Fire Chief Anthony Bott. The department was staffed by volunteers, other than the fire chief, who was considered part-time.
It had old equipment and old vehicles: A leaky 2006 ambulance, a 2000 ambulance, a 1993 fire engine and a brush truck from 1985. Old equipment fails more, Bott said.
But he said the department always had enough money in the budget to cover repairs. And when it had mechanical failures, volunteers used backup equipment, he said.
In February, the department was relying on a backup firetruck while its primary engine was being repaired. But while trying to respond to a Feb. 10 fire — which caused the death of former Sunset mayor John Nicholas and his wife, Nada, both in their 90s — the backup truck didn’t start.
The truck’s mechanical problem became one of the factors that contributed to the council’s decision to shut down the department.
Also, the fire station itself needed repairs to bring it up to fire code — including making the building seismically safe, according to emails between Macfarlane and Bott acquired by The Tribune via a records request.
“If we stay in that fire station we need to put money into that building. It is not safe,” Macfarlane wrote in a January email to Bott.
Building a new fire station would cost the city between $800,000 and $1.2 million, Bangerter said during the June city council meeting.
But Sunset’s new city building will be paid off in July 2018, and the city could then build a new fire station, Bott said, while keeping the payment the same as they were paying for the city building.
Bott had suggested in May that council members look at three budgets he formulated.
One budget kept the department’s expenses at a status quo level — $276,000, which was $18,000 lower than the 2017 budget, according to Bott.
His two other budgets anticipated hiring firefighters, either part-time or full-time.
But during their May budget meetings, council members considered only the most expensive proposal — a $585,000 option that would pay for full-time staff. The council opted to contract with the NDFD, which also serves West Point and Clearfield, at an estimated yearly cost of $169,000.
“You can’t continue to run status quo when there’s problems,” Bangerter explained to The Tribune. “That’s the definition for insanity, isn’t it?”
On Tuesday, citizens declined to discuss the dollars and cents and spoke from the heart, passionately asking to have their fire department — run by volunteers — reinstated.
“I am very concerned that you have put my family in jeopardy by removing the fire department,” Knight said.
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