In their first joint meeting since county commissioners voted in December to end the five-year city-county fire service agreement when it expires June 30, Bulloch County and Statesboro city officials clashed over the Bulloch County Fire Department’s proposal to take on half of the district and half of the expected $3 million revenue.

Chairman David Bennett of the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners convened the meeting Thursday morning in the commissioners’ community room. But it was officially a meeting of the Statesboro Fire Tax District Committee, and not the county board or Statesboro City Council. Only two elected officials were present from each side, with the rest of the participants being staff members.

“We know that things have changed a lot in the last few years since this plan was originally negotiated, and things are going to continue the change,” Bennett said in opening remarks. “We want to be open and honest about what’s happened. The plan as it’s written right now is something that we cannot continue to work with. We have to have change.”

Both the city and county have grown in population and other ways since the previous agreement was approved five years ago, he noted.

Interim County Manager Cindy Steinmann said that “many provisions” of the old agreement “are no longer adhered to.” Fire inspections in the district are no longer performed by the city, the district’s fire service tax rate, listed as 2.25 mills, has been increased to 2.75 mills, and the committee’s “annual meetings rarely happen,” she observed.

Bennett had said he wanted “open and honest dialogue” toward “a plan for the next couple of years.”

One-year transition

However, the one-year, July 1, 2025-June 30, 2026, proposal that Chief Ben Tapley of the Bulloch County Fire Department pitched during the meeting made the county takeover of half the fire district a one-year transitional step.

“Our position on the county side is basically this: The county will assume the responsibility of a portion of the five-mile district in the upcoming year, of roughly about half the district, incorporating it into the Rural Fire District. …” Tapley said.

“The new agreement would be a one-year contract that would terminate June 30th of 2026, and the Bulloch County Fire Department would then put infrastructure in place in the next year,” he continued, “and then take over what was the Statesboro Fire Tax District and take over all fire protection services outside the city limits of Statesboro.”

As he confirmed afterward, the idea is for his department to take over providing the primary fire response to half of the fire district this July 1 and then the other half just 12 months later.

Current arrangement

Currently, the Statesboro Fire Department provides primary fire response not only inside the city limits – where it is supported by the city’s own taxes – but out into the county unincorporated area for a five-mile radius around each of the SFD’s two fire stations. The county collects a fire service tax as an added millage rate – currently 2.75 mills – in the district and forwards the revenue, over $2.3 million last year, to the city.

The county also levies a fire service millage in all parts of the county outside the Statesboro Fire District  and keeps the revenue to fund the Bulloch County Fire Department. For the past several years the county has been upgrading the department from its former all-volunteer status  to a mixed career-firefighter and volunteer service. It now has three 24-hour stations – in Brooklet, Portal and Register – and employs 30 career firefighters, as well as having on-call volunteers and 11 volunteer stations.

Details of the county’s transitional proposal, as put forward by Tapley, include the division of the current Statesboro Fire District into two halves along a southwest-to-northeast line following U.S. Highway 301 on the west end and Georgia Highway 24 along the east end.

For this one year, starting July 1, the county would receive the northern and western portion for service by the Bulloch County Fire Department. The Statesboro Fire Department would continue to serve the southern and eastern “half.”

County staff officials also propose an increase to a 3-mill fire tax rate for the entire district, with the city and county to split the revenue for the year. With the half-districts nearly but not exactly equal, the 3-mill rate is projected to net $1.73 million for the county and not quite $1.62 million for the city. If left at 2.7 mills, the fire tax would generate not quite $1.56 million for the county and a little over $1.45 million for the city, according to Tax Assessors Office estimates.

Another bullet item in the county position statement Tapley presented was, “The County will be permitted to place infrastructure inside the current five-mile district.”

Under the old agreement, the county has been prohibited from building Bulloch County Fire Department stations inside the Statesboro Fire Tax District. Tapley insists that this be changed, and he appeared to have support of county Commissioner Timmy Rushing, who attended the meeting and asked who representing the county could have agreed to such a restriction in the first place.

“That’s a major sticking point for us….,” Tapley said. “It’s imperative for the growth of our department and for the citizens to be provided protection in those areas.”

His final position point, listed on a projection slide and handouts, was that an existing “automatic aid agreement will continue” between the two departments.

City’s response

But Statesboro City Manager Charles Penny called the continuance of the automatic aid agreement an assumption county officials should not make. To be clear, an automatic aid agreement is different from a mutual aid agreement. In any case, the city and county fire departments would continue to offer mutual aid, helping respond to fires and other emergencies when the other department requests it.

What they have now, however, is an automatic aid agreement, meaning they automatically respond to assist with each other’s calls. If that agreement were continued under the county’s proposal, Penny said, the Statesboro Fire Department would then be responding to the same incidents without receiving any funding from the county.

He noted that while Statesboro’s city limits encompass only 17 square miles of territory, the Statesboro Fire District includes 96 square miles of the county rural area. So that district constitutes 82% of the SFD’s current primary service area.

“However, our ability to provide services to the citizens of that fire district, and our response time, is better than any response time you’ve shared from your own information,” Penny told the county officials. “The average response time in the fire district from our Class 2 fire department is eight minutes, on average. Most of the time it’s less than that. From a fire standard, in the city limits our desire is to respond within four minutes.”

He noted that the city has now purchased property and has plans to build a third fire station, although the site is on Brannen Street, also within the city limits. The city in the past three years added 21 firefighter positions, the first nine paid from the fire fund and city general fund and the other 12 from a federal SAFER grant that covers the base salaries for the first three years.

ISO rating difference

After working with private water system operators to improve the water supply, the SFD in 2019 obtained an improved Insurance Services Office, or ISO, fire protection rating of “2” that extends into the county throughout the five-mile district.

ISO ratings are on a scale of 1 to 10, with “1” representing the best available fire response, and “10” no recognized public fire protection. Insurance companies generally provide lower premiums for lower ISO numbers, representing better fire protection.

The Bulloch County Fire Department’s ISO rating within five miles of its stations is 4/4Y, the split indicating that service is better where there is a better water supply.

But there are still areas on the ends of the county more than five miles from a recognized station that have a rating of “10.”

The city currently has a total of 69 career firefighters. The county has 30, but Tapley said he wants to hire 27 more in the next year, and the county will continue to utilize volunteers.

Penny says ‘no’

If the county insists that the city receive less than $2.3 million in a fire service agreement for the next fiscal year, Penny will recommend letting the current agreement end and not be replaced with a new one, and also ending automatic aid, he said.

“So I’ll recommend that our council that we cancel this agreement effective July 1, 2025, and when I say that, we do need to understand the impact of that in your fire district,” Penny told county officials.

“Financially it will hurt the city of Statesboro. …,” he acknowledged, but continued, “When we cancel this agreement effective June 30th of 2025, every citizen in the fire district is going to be seriously impacted by higher insurance rates because they will no longer have the services of a Class 2 fire department.”

Much more was said during the nearly 90-minute open meeting, and city and county staff members planned to talk later. But no compromise was made or suggested Thursday.