Dear Editor,
I am a retired Los Angeles county firefighter. I served 31 years and retired in 1999. We moved to Kingman 10 years ago. We live in the NACFD district and have noticed a lot of campaign signs for former board members Lucero, Veradt, and Brown. On these signs they say if elected they will reopen five closed fire stations. Why are those stations closed? No fire chief in the world wants to close a working station. The reason a station has to close is because there is no longer the tax base to fund it. Some of those stations must have been volunteer stations. Even with volunteer stations you have to have qualified people to men or women to man them. You have to have a person that can drive and pump a fire engine and all personnel must have CPR, etc., certifications. Not easy to get several volunteer stations to reopen. As far as I know we do not have the tax base to reopen one station let alone five.
They also state they will eliminate wasteful spending. I believe they are referring to “The Green Barn” at 2600 Northern, purchased to replace the current station down the street. I believe that building is under contract for renovations and when finished will provide the much needed room and will also serve as board offices. The building was purchased a few years ago when these three were board members. I remember the vote was 5 to 0 to purchase. It was then going to be exactly what was needed. I still think it was a good decision to buy it. They paid $500,000 for it and the current board is spending a little over a million to retrofit it. There is no way they could build it any cheaper in today’s market. Now if elected I believe this is what they refer to a s a “waste of money.”
These three also state the want to eliminate the intergovernmental agreement with Kingman Fire Department (KFD) and that KFD wants to take over NACFD. That makes no sense to me so I called Chief Rhodes and asked if I could meet with him. I went to his office and asked him point blank if KFD wanted to take over NACFD and he gave me a resounding “No!” Kingman has no intention of taking over NACFD. Chief Rhodes did say since the agreement, both departments work much better together. We did the same think in L.A., with our surrounding cities. We even spoke the same language on fires and made out incident run much smoother. Do not take my word for all this. In The Standard Sept. 23 edition on Page 4, is a letter from Board Chairman Jim Bailey outlining the first year progress under the IGA. The same can be found in the Kingman Miner, Oct. 4 edition, also on page 4 under Community View. I do not know any of the former or current board members. I met Chief Rhodes in his office for 20 minutes and I had seen him at the 911 ceremony at Firefighters Park.
It seems to me that the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” might apply here, and NACFD does not appear to need fixing. I would say the current board of Bailey – Berg – Collins are doing a good job.
The men and women of NACFD do a good job and put their lives on the line daily for us. The least we can do for them is support them by keeping the current board.
Michael Thorpe
Kingman
