Voters in Goshen and Pleasant Hill are considering whether to consolidate their fire services, fund a new fire station, and expand staffing. Measures 20-344, 20- 347, and 20-345 are on the Nov. 7 ballot.
Pleasant Hill and Goshen established a joint fire authority 5 years ago that funds firefighters, a fire chief and equipment. The proposal is to fully consolidate the two districts into a single entity.
Todd Anderson is President of the Pleasant Hill Fire District Board of Directors and he’s on the board of the Pleasant Hill Goshen Fire Authority.
He said a Pleasant Hill Goshen Fire District would support more fire staff and a new Pleasant Hill Fire station that could be staffed 24 hours a day.
“It will make the response times better,” said Anderson. “It will give us much better coverage for both communities, both Pleasant Hill and Goshen.”
The cost of the consolidated Fire District would be $2.20 per $1,000 assessed value of property for Pleasant Hill and Goshen residents.
For Pleasant Hill, that would be a doubling of their current rate, which is $1.10. Goshen residents are paying $1.72, so they’d see a smaller increase.
Anderson said another benefit of the consolidated district would be that emergency crews could respond to more than one fire or disaster at a time.
“We’re getting to situations more now where we could have double calls,” Anderson said. “So, a fire crew can be out on one call and we may get another call in. So, we then have to either split resources or rely on mutual agreements with surrounding fire districts.”
Over the summer, Anderson said, they were able to increase staff thanks to grant funding and house crews at the Pleasant Hill Fire station which was helpful. But, that station cannot support fulltime staffing.
“It was never built for that,” Anderson said. “And, we’ve had seismic studies done and seismically, it was never built for that. It is rated very, very poorly. So, if we were to have some kind of seismic event, it could suffer very, very severe damage. But, there is no way that we can house staff there currently.”
He said he’s heard a lot of support from people he’s talked to about the district proposal.
He said it’s really hard to get volunteer firefighters and they need to have a new model where they have both paid and volunteer staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Anderson expects that with this level of funding, they won’t need to ask for additional tax levies in the foreseeable future.
