Tuesday night, Tim Kelly of 62 Westview stepped to the public-comment mic at the Farmington Town Council meeting and asked the council for one specific thing: an inventory of the town's current volunteer-firefighter ranks, broken out by decade. Not a study. Not a position paper. A count — twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties — by station and in aggregate.
He had cause. The council voted unanimously on May 12 to advance a $30-to-$35 million fire-station overhaul that would replace two of Farmington's three volunteer stations and renovate the third. The plan rests, in part, on the volunteer system staying a volunteer system — the Ad Hoc Fire Station Committee that produced it explicitly designed for "the next 50 plus years" and built in flexibility to adapt if Farmington's staffing model changes over that span. Town Manager Kathleen Blonski told the council that volunteerism is declining across Connecticut and the country, but presented the recommendation as one that protects the volunteer model rather than reckons with what might replace it.
Kelly, who the Mercury has profiled before for exactly this kind of line-by-line attention to the town's numbers, wants Farmington to look at the demographic data before the council walks the next leg of the project. "Before running with that assumption" of a continuing volunteer model, he told the council Tuesday, "and given the experience of many other towns in central Connecticut, I think we need to look at some data."
His ask, verbatim: "How many members by station and in aggregate are now age 20 to 29, age 30 to 39, age 40 to 49, age 50 to 59, and age 60 to 69?"
Then he added, by way of a callback: "as we sit here on a potential site for Consolidated Fire Engine Company 1." That phrase — Consolidated Fire Engine Company 1 — was Kelly's name for the alternative he raised on May 12: a two-station plan, one on each side of the river, that the ad hoc committee had not seriously studied. The age question and the consolidation question are, in his telling, the same question. The data tells you whether one or the other actually works.
The council, for its part, had heard the consolidation argument on May 12 and answered it on the merits. Keith Vibert, a Second District Republican, said he was glad the plan kept each station on its current property — Tunxis Hose, he noted, "feels strongly about being in the center of Unionville." The volunteer departments, he said, had "waited their turn." That is the case for the three-station footprint. Kelly's May 26 question is whether the volunteer system that justifies it will still be there to staff it.
The council did not respond on the floor. Kelly said he'd look forward to seeing the analysis at the next council meeting, on June 9.
A question with no obvious home
Where the answer would actually go is its own question. The Ad Hoc Fire Station Committee that recommended the plan was disbanded by the same May 12 vote that approved its work. The new Fire Station Building Committee, which the council seated that night, was charged to "focus on advancing the proposed project rather than repeating the preliminary evaluation process." Whether the volunteer model continues to support a three-station footprint is, by any reading, an evaluation question — the part of the work the new committee's charge tells it not to revisit.
Farmington runs a predominantly volunteer fire department, supplemented by nine full-time career firefighters and EMTs and a private ambulance service. Its three companies are Tunxis Hose, Farmington Fire, and East Farms Fire. The town has not, to the Mercury's knowledge, made a roster-by-age tally publicly available.
The June 9 meeting will tell the council whether anyone went and got the numbers.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road — the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. The town spends years figuring out how to preserve a building. Climate-controlled storage figured out how to preserve everything you put in it on the front end. The difference is mostly a question of who has to file the cost estimate. 📦 860.777.4001
— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's fire-station discussion long enough to know that "we'll say, not exceed $36 million" is the kind of number that only goes up, and that "let's count first" is the kind of suggestion that only saves money. He has read the May 26 transcript twice. The coffee is cold. ☕
*The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering — the public commenter who reads the cost estimates more closely than some of the people voting, the committee whose charge tells it not to ask the obvious question, the resident who keeps coming back. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it: by the time you read this, the dust has settled, the votes are counted, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰