43
Fire station remains closed
LIBERTY
Township officials still don’t know when the Belmont Avenue fire station will reopen.
The station, one of two in the township, closed July 17 as a cost-saving measure. The fire department is operating out of the other station on Logan Way.
Fire Chief Gus Birch said closing the station is saving approximately $2,000 to $2,500 a month in utilities.
The trustees also have asked the department to cut back on overtime.
The cost-cutting is in response to a projected deficit of approximately $225,000 at the end of 2015 in the fire department’s budget, according to township Fiscal Officer Steve Shelton.
Township officials would like to reopen the Belmont station before winter because the trucks need to be inside or water in them will freeze. There isn’t enough room at the Logan Way station for all of them to be inside.
“Come November, [the station] is going back up, no matter what,” said Trustee Jason Rubin at the Sept. 8 trustees’ meeting.
Response time also is a factor that concerns the firefighters’ union president Justin Graham, Graham has said.
He and Birch said there are approximately 5,000 homes in the north and western parts of the township that are affected by the station’s closing.
Shelton said Tuesday he continues to wait for information from Trumbull County on how much real-estate tax allocation the township has to work with until February. He said the county is having trouble with a third-party software provider, and allocations were not ready.
He said the township can anticipate how much taxes it will receive.
“But we don’t know who isn’t paying,” he said. “The collection rate has been going down.”