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Wrightsville Beach
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Wrightsville leaders deny fire chief’s equipment requests

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Wrightsville Beach Fire Chief Glen Rogers asked town leaders June 8 for an equipment purchase he said would make the beach safer, but they denied his request, saying that supplemental expenditures went against the board’s comprehensive budget process.

Town staff and leaders spent several months this spring prioritizing expenditures in the 2016-17 budget, as they do every year. Rogers was hired at the end of the budget process so he did not get input on his department’s purchases.

He realized the need for more equipment after a string of recent incidents — an offshore plane crash, a fire that destroyed a local business, a near drowning and a boat fire.

While he couldn’t make requests in the 2016-17 budget, he found unused funds from various line items in the 2015-16 budget that would cover the cost of a Jet Ski for $13,100 and four portable two-way radios for $16,000.

The aldermen did not want to pay for either of the items out of the town’s budget, but they agreed to explore the possibility of the New Hanover County Tourism Development Authority (TDA) funding the Jet Ski. The TDA provides a budget for tourism-related items like ocean rescue, and they’ve funded portable watercrafts for Wrightsville’s lifeguards before, Mayor Bill Blair said.

Rogers requested the new Jet Ski to replace ocean rescue’s secondary watercraft, which isn’t working well. They recently took it to a mechanic and discovered saltwater was leaking into the fuel tank.

Ocean Rescue needs two watercrafts for busy summer days, Rogers said. They typically station one at Johnnie Mercer’s Pier, where they have to make the most rescues, but Rogers wants the guards to be able to respond quickly to sound-side issues, too.

“We’ve already had a couple of boat mishaps on the sound side this summer,” he said. “We see that as a weakness we’d like to strengthen up.”

The Wrightsville Beach Police Department has a boat docked near the public works building in Big Lollipop Bay, but Rogers said it isn’t as easy to pull people out of the water onto the deck. And police chief Dan House said if officers aren’t actively patrolling in the vessel it could take them 30 to 45 minutes to reach a victim in the waterway.

Rogers said his request for radios is due to a current shortage. The fire department has 27 radios but they should have 35, Rogers said, because his goal is for each firefighter to have one. The two-way radios allow firefighters to stay in communication with incident command, a capability he wished more of his firefighters had when fighting the fire at Kings Beachware on April 29.

One of the volunteer firefighters got to the scene four minutes before Rogers and the rest of the squad arrived, but he wasn’t able to contact them.

“He was basically standing around, and he could have given us a report that would have helped our operations out,” Rogers said.

The aldermen said while the radio purchase wasn’t urgent enough to take money out of the town’s budget, it might be the type of purchase for which the fire department could seek a grant.

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