Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
The Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant application request from Oregon fire chief Clayton O’Brien was approved at the June 9 regular city council meeting.
The SAFER grant is offered by FEMA to assist local municipality fire departments in hiring more firefighter staff. Chief O’Brien’s plan is to hire nine full-time firefighters for his department through this grant.
“If the grant is awarded, we would have 180 days to ‘on-board’ all nine additional full-time firefighters,” O’Brien said. “We are going to be setting to re-test our civil service to re-formulate a list. That will start up here in the next few months. That will be completed, and all those positions would come from that list.”
The SAFER grant carries a stipulation in which the city would be required to match funds with FEMA from the grant over a period of three years, with the first two matching at 25 percent and year three matching at 65 percent.
Oregon city administrator Joel Mazur said that 18 part-time firefighters have resigned since late 2022, but 17 new ones were hired as replacements since then.
“There’s one less but I can tell you that as of right now, the number of hours worked is way up,” he said. “(It is) a difference of somewhere between 3,500 hours worked to 5,500 hours worked, so the part-timers that that have been hired in are working more hours.”
Mazur also addressed the question he’s received asking why they’re looking at hiring full-time firefighters when they’ve had a lot of part-timers resign.
“The numbers show that we’re just about even from where we were about two-and-a-half years ago,” he said. “We’re actually getting more hours worked out of them.”
Oregon mayor Michael Seferian, who said the productivity among the firefighters is up 2-1 from what they had to what they have now, feels optimistic with the grant application request because of the department’s “futuristic thoughts of new money” in the city’s system.
The council’s approval is simply for the application for the grant. Should the city receive approval for the grant, which O’Brien said should come no later than August or September of this year, council would then have to vote whether to accept it.
At the same meeting, Seferian received approval from council for the appointment of Jarrett Lerma of Archbold as a full-time firefighter effective June 16.
