Estevan Fire Chief Dale Feser was at Estevan City Council on Monday with two fairly significant issues: the addition of a new fire truck to replace an old one, and determining who is responsible for paying a bill from a wildfire earlier this year.

Starting with the addition of a new fire truck to the fleet, the reason this is on the table is that the firetruck they are looking at replacing is nearing 22 years old. The truck was set to last for 20 years.

"This is kind of a new process," said Feser. "The city manager had asked me to reach out to some other peers other fire departments to see if we've actually used the purchasing program called central source that's available through the municipalities of Saskatchewan so sadly and none of the other departments are currently in their budgetary replacement cycle where they have taken advantage of this and went still under the old tendering process is and whatnot."

The firetruck in question was already approved in years past as they allow for $250,000 per year towards fleet renewal to make sure that large expenses for a new truck wouldn't be an issue. Feser spoke with four different companies about the needs of the Estevan station on their truck, and all three were around $950,000 Canadian, with about a $10,000 difference from most to least expensive. 

"We could actually just go out and purchase from whatever vendor without any sort of tendering process, and we just couldn't wrap our heads around that with the lack of information that was provided to us from the other fire departments. We still felt that we needed some sort of transparency, and still went through the process and invited four of these pre-approved companies to invest or vendors if you will to submit the price quote for the general specs of the fire trucks."

The new firetruck is going to be built by a company called Rocky Mountain Phoenix, a Canadian company whose nearest location is in Red Deer, and a company that has supplied trucks to Estevan in the past. The build will take somewhere between 14-16 months before it's operational and here in the fleet.

"Again, we wanna be transparent 'cause we're spending taxpayer dollars here so we can get the best possible deal that we can do with the money."

The other fire-related topic at council was from a wildland fire that the Estevan Fire Department extinguished in the RM of Estevan on their way back from a different fire in the RM of Cymri. The department was never called to the fire but instead extinguished it themselves.

All proper procedures were followed. Crews called the controlled burn line to make sure no one had called this fire in and no one had. They made sure no one was present to watch over the fire and decided that the risk of the fire spreading before someone did in fact call it in was too great to leave it alone, and extinguished it.

That leaves the question of who is responsible for the bill? Originally the landowner given the bill, but they were not the cause of the fire, and in fact, the fire had not started on their land. It started just off the road on RM property, and therefore they were given the bill. The RM of Estevan then asked for a meeting with Feser to examine this further and ask for a reimbursement.

"Obviously the landowner was upset and he was one that was requesting that he wouldn't have to be accountable for the bill. There's a little bit of back and forth there as far as to responsibility, but at the end of the meeting, it was actually a fairly healthy discussion, which alluded to the fact that there wasn't enough information provided in the billing instruction to correctly bill this. I flat out told him if I were you guys, I would have not billed the homeowner as the point of origin was in the right of way. These went into the roadway, but based on the information in the lab coordinates, they just forward that onto the ratepayer."

A long discussion went on between councilors and Feser about the proper course of action. Mayor Ludwig offered to pay half of the bill to the RM, although if things were done by the book the RM would be responsible for the $963 bill. Ultimately though, it was decided to split the bill based on the promise from the mayor and keeping good relations between the two, but if something like this were to come up in the future, the book would be followed a little tighter. 

Councilor Shelly Veroba was not involved in the decision of Estevan City Council as she works for the RM of Estevan, which would have caused a conflict of interest.