Six months after voters approved the dissolution of the Animas and Hermosa fire protection districts, seven candidates are vying to fill three seats on the newly consolidated Durango Fire Protection District Board in a May 6 election.
The candidates are Wayne Barger, Kathleen “Kathy” Morris, Tony Whittle and Patti Zink – three of them, Kitty Benzar, Carrie Cline and Claude “Bud” Deering are running together on a platform hoping to make the board more accessible and transparent.
The first thing they’d like to change is how elections are handled.
“They didn’t want to do a mail-in election because of the cost ($15,000 to $20,000),” Benzar said. “But most people didn’t even know an election is happening because they did the minimum of what the law requires, posting on fire stations and the courthouse and running it in Legal Notices in The Durango Herald.”
But that minimal notice doesn’t encourage citizen participation, she said.
“Heck, those laws date back before the telephone, not to mention the Internet,” she said. “It’s way more opaque than it needs to be, and it gives the appearance of trying to suppress the vote, even though I don’t think that’s what they’re trying to do.”
The trio also wants to guarantee that residents on the outlying borders of the district get adequate services.
“There’s a gravitational pull to Durango all the time,” Benzar, a former emergency services technician, said. “We want to be on guard against sacrificing services to the outer parts of the district. If it takes two minutes to respond in Durango, then it should take five to me out in the county, or at least it shouldn’t take 20.”
City residents have different needs than rural residents, Cline said. Emergency calls in the winter should be made in a four-wheel drive ambulance so they don’t get stuck in the snow, for example.
“A lot of us in the northern part of the county received cancellations on our insurance policies after the Black Forest Fire, including me,” she said. “I had never missed a payment or been late in 15 years. (Chief) Dan (Noonan) came up with a couple of his guys and did a complete evaluation of my property, sending a letter on DFRA (Durango Fire and Rescue Authority) letterhead to the insurance company. I was reinstated, but a lot of people are still dealing with it.”
The district is essentially an oblong doughnut, with the city of Durango in the hole, so city of Durango residents who don’t own property in either of the former districts can stay home May 6. Because the city contracts for services from DFPD and pays for them from General Fund, city residents are not eligible to vote.
The new board members will join Jim Barrett, Matt Leder, Joe Lloyd and Bill Webbe in providing fiscal oversight to a department with a $10 million budget that provides fire and emergency services to a 325-square-mile area. The district responded to a record 4,265 calls in 2013, up 7 percent from 2012.
“It’s been growing about 7 percent every year in the last few years,” Noonan said. “In addition to the increasing number of calls, we’re responding to increasingly complex situations, more wildfires, shootings, dealing with hazardous materials. In the same time period, we’ve been dealing with budget constraints from lowering oil and gas revenues and depressed home values because of the recession.”
Noonan said the district is pulling $530,000 from its reserves this year just to maintain service levels, which is why the board decided against incurring the expense of a mail-in election.
A complete coverage analysis of current service needs and what is projected for the future will be one of the first things the board will see happen, he said. The district hasn’t done one since 2007-08.
“With consolidation finally complete, it’s time to start working toward the future,” Noonan said. “We have major needs for capital improvements, need to look into ways to increase the safety of firefighters and have to figure out how we can afford some capital equipment.”
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