City Councilman Andrew Faulkner, believes the debate over hiring eight additional firefighters is “100% political.” He explained that the council’s goal is to determine a financially responsible way to increase public safety and hire more firefighters. Pictured, from left, are City Councilman Andrew Faulkner, R-Ward VI, and City Councilwoman Kim Ecklund, R-At Large. P-J photo by Timothy Frudd

City Councilman Andrew Faulkner, R-Ward VI, believes the debate concerning the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grant is “100% political,” as City Council members have been criticized for considering the city’s financial responsibility instead of passing the SAFER grant at the most recent meeting.

“I’ve seen a lot of people kind of voicing their opinions that it’s dumb that council asked so many questions at the voting session before tabling it and that we should have done our homework ahead of time,” he said. “That is absolutely incorrect. Every question I asked at the voting session, ahead of time, I already knew the answer to and I just wanted everybody to be on the same page.”

Faulkner explained that while City Council members already knew the answers to many of the questions that were asked to city administration officials, the council wanted the answers to be “on record” so the public could be better informed and so that everyone was “on the same page” at the meeting.

While he acknowledged that many community members were upset that the City Council decided to table the resolution until next month’s voting session, he indicated that there was not enough support for the resolution to pass this month.

“Tabling it gives us a month to kind of work on it and figure it out and hope we can come up with something, so honestly in my opinion, it was either getting tabled or it was getting voted down,” he said.

Faulkner told The Post-Journal the City Council has been “kind of misled” into thinking that the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grant was “eight firefighters or nothing.” While council members were led to believe there was nothing that could be done to alter the grant requirements, Faulkner said there are roughly 90 pages of information on FEMA’s website pertaining to the SAFER grant’s regulations and stipulations. After reading through the information, Faulkner said that it appears municipalities can amend the amount if approval is granted by FEMA.

According to Faulkner, the City Council succeeded at getting Mayor Eddie Sundquist to agree to contact FEMA regarding a potential compromise on the number of firefighters hired under the SAFER grant. Faulkner said each council member has sent the mayor questions to ask FEMA before the City Council votes on the resolution next month.

“Honestly, eight isn’t sustainable,” he said. “We have the four ARPA positions now, and it would be a huge burden to the budget regardless of what the mayor wants to say in his press releases that it’s no impact to the budget or a minor impact. It has a significant impact to the budget, and we don’t want to be in a position in 36 months to be laying off the eight SAFER employees and the four ARPA employees.”

Faulkner said the City Council is hoping to develop a plan to, at minimum, keep the four firefighters funded by the American Rescue Plan Act after the ARPA funding is expended. He warned that by hiring eight additional firefighters without a financial plan for the future, the city might have “dug a hole” that would have resulted in laying off the ARPA firefighters as well as the additional eight firefighters proposed by the city administration.

“We want a sustainable method of fully staffing the fire department,” Faulkner said. “The financials have to make sense, and we struggled to get the supporting financials behind everything what the cost was going to be through the grant and after the grant. We received partial information that turned out to be incorrect a few weeks ago, and then last Monday or a day or two before last Monday, I believe we received the proper financials and Councilwoman Ecklund dug into that a whole ton and did a little bit of work on it.”

While Faulkner said he has not yet seen any financial information regarding how the SAFER grant could impact the annual budget if the city reduced the number of additional firefighters from eight to four; however, he indicated that a reduction of the number of additional firefighters could receive support from more City Council members.

“That is all dependent on kind of digging into the numbers, but the main goal is to keep the firefighters for the life of ARPA and beyond,” he said. “We don’t want to have to dig ourselves into a hole and get rid of those four ever.”

Faulkner told The Post-Journal he believes the debate over the SAFER grant is “100% political.” Being an election year, Faulkner said he thinks everyone is trying to “do things they can use in their campaign right now,” and that hiring eight additional firefighters would be an opportunity for people to capitalize on from a political perspective.

“I do think it’s been turned political a little bit, and I’ll be honest, when I decided I wanted to run for council, I just thought, small town everybody can get along and do what’s best and we can work together,” he said. “Council was blindsided and kind of led astray on some of the details of this grant and we’re being made out to look like the bad guys, but our goal is to just find a sustainable way to staff the fire department.”

Echoing other members of the City Council, Faulkner explained that the council is not against the Jamestown Fire Department. Nevertheless, he said the City Council’s job is to make responsible financial decisions.

“We just have a duty to be financially responsible and make things work the best we can,” he said.