This Tuesday, before the regularly scheduled Sycamore City Council meeting, the city held a special meeting of the Public Safety Committee to discuss certain fiscal matters pertaining to fire department spending.

“There has been a trend developing, especially in the fire department, in not achieving marks, particularly with overtime,” said city manager Bill Nicklas.

With the addition of a second firehouse finished this past May, the fire department has been experiencing difficulties in keeping their budget down. It is required that there be a minimum of six persons to staff the two stations, which meant the fire department had to have more people on staff than in years past.

Fire Chief Bill Riddle spoke about callbacks or recalls, in which certain amounts of firefighters are paged for duty according to the type of alarm that is raised. Riddle said more people are choosing to respond to these callbacks, and therefore must be paid for their time which increases the percent of budget needed for employee payment.

“We need to limit the opportunity for callback,” Riddle said.

Solutions were also proposed regarding the problem of increased spending on overtime.

The first of which is a platoon system, which would limit the number of employees who would be recalled for certain alarms. The system would include three platoons which would each respond to alarms for 24 hours, until the next platoon comes on call.

A second solution proposed centered around payment for firefighters to be on-call. This would allow additional wages for employees who agree to be on-call during certain months each year and therefore respond to certain alarms.

The fire department management and the IAFF Local 3046 will discuss the matter further and have a new report to the city manager by Oct. 5.

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