Greenville Annexation stories

[brian]

This is only tangentially related to radio communications, but for those of us that monitor and follow fire departments, this could be of interest:

Cherrydale zoning talks spark discussions about fire response times

GREENVILLE, S.C. (WSPA) — The city of Greenville is one step closer to annexing the Cherrydale area. The city’s planning commission unanimously voted 6-0 to recommend zoning for the are…

www.wspa.com

Greenville fire chief responds to Cherrydale response time concerns

Once again, leaders with the county’s Parker Service District say there’s no way city fire can respond faster to Cherrydale.

www.foxcarolina.com

The story here is that Greenville City is going to annex a shopping area just north of the current city limits. The independent fire district that currently serves this area stands to lose $500k annually in property tax revenue to the city, despite having a manned station a mile closer to the area. The City FD and independent FD cannot reach an auto aid agreement.

This should be a red flag to citizens and businesses in Greenville and elsewhere. Many counties in South Carolina still have a patchwork of independent fire departments providing service to large majorities of citizens. In general, this is a bad deal for citizens and taxpayers. Service levels vary widely from one department to the next, as do tax rates. Some departments that still depend on a majority of volunteers struggle to provide basic services. Stations and apparatus are located either far away from each other or very close to each other due to lack of coordination. Financial irregularities have occurred in quite a few departments over the years due to lax oversight. This situation in Greenville shows that classic turf battles and jealousy/resentment among departments is still a real thing that affects service to citizens. If Greenville County had a funding responsibility for departments covering unincorporated areas of the county, this transfer of funding wouldn't be so much of a problem.

To bring this back to a communications topic, one of the issues cited by the independent fire department chief is communication problems between city and county fire dispatch. This isn't a technical issue because all fire departments in Greenville use Palmetto 800 for their primary communications. This is a problem with calls being transferred between city and county fire dispatchers in different PSAPs. To me, it seems ridiculous that any municipality would feel the need to operate their own PSAP and dispatch center.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

 

[KMG54]

I agree Brian, the parker station is three blocks away. Why screw up a good thing? Money money money. With all the people moving to Greenville, the city see's money. I want to go back 20 years when all was working fine. My town is already referred to southern Asheville and getting worse by the day.

 

[evan]

I wish SC, at the state legislative level, would eliminate these special tax districts and statutorily require fire departments to be run by municipal and county governments. Or, as Brian says, have funding come from the county. There is so much redundancy and wasted tax dollars when you have multiple PSAPs and dispatch centers in a single county, some only answering and dispatching for a few stations. Not to mention all the extra costs of middle management, chiefs, training, buying supplies without being able to leverage volume discounts, etc.

I've always had concerns about spending oversight with these districts as well. They seem to operate as their own little kingdoms. I wonder how often they are audited. And I wonder how spending decisions get made.

And not being able to come to mutual aid agreements is just childish. Silly "turf battles" should't exist where public safety is at stake. The closest station should respond to an emergency, period. This should be mandated by law.

Some counties seem to have figured it out a little better than others-Georgetown for example with Midway and Murrells Inlet, where they are dispatched by the county and have autoaid agreements. Greenville County's situation is the worst I've seen and it seems to be getting worse as population expands there.

 

[rescuecomm]

The property tax is the main issue. The city wants the tax revenue for operations and not because it looks good on a "Live in Greenville brochure".

Losing the funding for multiple firefighting positions and what probably pays for loans on equipment is going to hurt. Even though there is a statue on the books that keeps the previous group from defaulting immediately on an annexation tax loss.

The City of Easley did the same thing to the Croswell District by annexing the most valuable part of the 123 corridor.

 

[KMG54]

Yep, and croswell is my backup FD. We won't even talk about Dacusville FD, still volunteer, with only a couple paid fire fighters.

 

[rescuecomm]

The Dacusville area is a bedroom community with no industry or commercial to tax. Just seven paid firefighters including a chief is $300,000 a year. Adds a lot to homeowners property taxes. I can remember back in the day when city fire departments charged $25 a year for rural protection. They kept a list of who paid. That’s when the special tax districts came into being. The district could vote for a paid/volunteer department, a contract with an existing FD, or no fire protection at all. Easley used to cover Croswell's district for an exorbitant fee. Especially since they had no tankers and the district had few hydrants.