By DAN TOMASELLO
LYNNFIELD — Chief/Emergency Management Director Glenn Davis is looking to add a full-time administrative assistant in the Fire Department’s fiscal year 2026 operating budget.
Davis presented the Fire Department’s $2,231,648 preliminary operating budget for FY26 during the Select Board’s Jan. 13 meeting. The proposed spending plan represents a 5.1 percent increase over FY25’s $2,122,822 appropriation.
While the Fire Department was able to add two full-time career firefighters in the current FY25 operating budget in order to improve response times to overnight calls, Davis is not requesting more career firefighters for FY26 because the Fire Department was awarded a $1,199,469.08 Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) Grant Program from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) last year. The SAFER Grant was used to hire four additional career firefighters and is funding their salaries and benefits for the next three years.
Davis recalled that the Fire Department’s staffing model is comprised of full-time career firefighters and call firefighters who have other jobs. He said his main goal for FY26 is to “continue to recruit and retain call firefighters.”
“It’s hard to maintain them when they realize the workload put upon them when they have another full-time career that keeps them busy during the day and we ask them to get up in the middle of the night,” said Davis. “It continues to be a challenge, but we continue to add to the forces. This year we had a net gain of one. We hired six in the last five years. As long as we continue to add them, we will continue to do that.”
Select Board Chair Dick Dalton asked if former call firefighters left to join other fire departments or left for other reasons.
“Two were lost to other full-time departments,” said Davis. “They got full-time career jobs elsewhere. Two of them were career firefighters elsewhere and were giving me some time as call firefighters. It just didn’t work out with their schedules, and they both decided to go back to their own host community. We have got one currently in the academy now up in Rowley. He should graduate in another month, and he will help us. He lives in town and is available partially during the day. He should be a good addition.”
Davis has budgeted $1,282,488 for career firefighter salaries.
“The salary line items for the career firefighters is level-funded from last year because we are going into contract negotiations as we speak,” said Davis. “We are hoping to get that done by the start of the fiscal year.”
Davis said he is requesting a full-time administrative assistant in the FY26 spending plan. He said he shares an administrative assistant with Police Chief Nick Secatore that is funded with the call firefighters portion of the Fire Department’s spending plan.
“I asked for a part-time administrative assistant a little over two years ago,” said Davis. “I do share an administrative assistant with the police chief. He gives me a portion of his time, and I fund that out of that part of my budget. It is getting increasingly difficult to manage a Fire Department without a full-time administrative assistant. I am the only fire chief in Essex County who does not have one.”
In addition to the SAFER Grant, Davis said the Fire Department received a $708,818 Assistance to Firefighters Grant from FEMA that is being shared with Danvers, Middleton, North Reading and Peabody. He noted that Lynnfield is the host community for that grant. The grant is being used to help launch an incident command-training program. Davis said the administrative assistant will help him manage the two large grants.
Select Board member Alexis Leahy asked how the two large grants currently are being managed.
Davis said he is in charge of managing the two large grants.
“The person who wrote the grants for us is a retired fire chief who retired from this department years ago,” said Davis. “He assists me with that, but his bandwidth isn’t there every single day. Our Accounting Department does a great job helping us with it, but they can’t manage it. I get invoices from the other towns. We have to submit those to FEMA and they review them. They decide whether it is reimbursable. Sometimes I have to go back to the community and say I need better payroll records or something, and it gets submitted again. When the money comes back from FEMA, there is then an invoice to pay back the community that spent their money. There is a lot of work there.”
Davis also said the administrative assistant would have other responsibilities.
“There are a lot of activities that go on in the Fire Department,” said Davis. “A lot of our (fire prevention) phone calls go unanswered because our guys are out doing emergency calls. It goes to an automated answering service, which most people dislike. We are scheduling car seat inspections and home sale inspections. Fire prevention is a very busy entity that this person can assist with. Payroll is complicated every week because we have career firefighters and we have call firefighters. There are countless things that this person can easily do.”
Davis has budgeted $364,750 for call firefighter salaries, which represents a 3 percent increase over FY25’s $354,127 allocation.
In response to a question from Dalton, Davis said the Fire Department pays call firefighters for three hours when they are called back for overnight incidents instead of the previous two hours.
“Their base salaries remain the same other than increasing holiday time worked,” said Davis.
Dalton asked Davis if more call firefighters are responding to overnight calls due to the callback hours increasing.
Davis said the call firefighters who traditionally respond to overnight calls are “a little bit happier because they are getting a three-hour minimum.”
“But it is not making more people come out,” said Davis. “It’s the same people who continue to come out, so it really didn’t make much of an impact that we hoped it would.”
Select Board Vice Chair Phil Crawford asked Davis if the six call firefighters who have been hired over the last five years have been “willing to get up” and respond to overnight calls.
“I think that might be something that you insist that they do,” said Crawford.
Davis said it is “hard to insist.”
“We have tried that, but how do I insist that somebody get up two or three times at night when they still have to get up at 7 a.m. to go to their day job that pays their mortgage, their bills and their kids’ college tuition,” said Davis. “Insist is difficult, but we have tried persuasion in a lot of ways. We tried to change their pay structure. We are one of the best paying call departments in the area. We pay for their EMT re-certifications, we pay for training and we pay for a lot of different things that other departments do not. And then we try to go down the penalize road. If you don’t give me a minimum amount of shift work to cover shifts, then you are not eligible for details. But an inactive person does not care about not getting details because they are not getting them today.”
Crawford agreed with Davis that trying to persuade call firefighters to respond to overnight calls was a better strategy than insisting that they respond to calls for service.
Leahy, who supports moving towards a full-time career Fire Department, noted that Davis has previously discussed moving towards that model in the past. She asked if he was still open to that proposal.
“My goal always has been and still remains to preserve our combination Fire Department for as long as we can,” said Davis. “It is the most cost-effective way that we can run and maintain the staffing that we see today. Is it going to be here forever? No it is not. Do I see it staying here for the next five to seven years? I do. We are doing a great job recruiting call firefighters. We find people who live in town and didn’t know we hire call firefighters, and they are already EMTs or paramedics. Those are easy lifts for us to put them through the fire academy and get them to come in. Eventually, we are going to exhaust those resources and people are just not going to want to keep coming out for two careers. We are headed that way, but I think we can preserve it for a minimum of five more years. I really do.”
Davis said the Fire Department received 100 fewer calls during 2024, which he attributed to the EMT staffing crisis improving slightly.
“Some of the private ambulance services in our surrounding areas are doing a little bit better,” said Davis. “We are going to Peabody less than we used to. We are going a little more frequently to Saugus, and less frequently to Wakefield and Lynn. We are getting called less for mutual aid, so it is less taxing on us, but it did affect our overall call volume for the year last year.”
Dalton said Davis’ operating budget request for FY26 is “fiscally responsible.”
“As usual, you have put forward a very detailed plan to give us a great understanding of not just the numbers, but what is behind the numbers,” said Dalton. “Thanks for a great presentation.”