Hernando County Fire Rescue to immediately occupy Hernando Beach fire station
At its Tuesday, February 14 meeting, the Hernando County Board of County Commissioners voted 3 to 1 to terminate the Hernando Beach Volunteer Fire Department’s (HBVFD) contract for fire services and its ground lease at 3451 Shoal Line Blvd. The vote allowed a 60-day transition period and directed the County’s Purchasing Department to take action to account for all inventory and documentation at the property.
Today at approximately 9:30 a.m. the HBVFD’s Fire Chief Chichester informed Hernando County Fire Rescue (HCFR) that he will be handing over the keys to the building at 2 p.m. today and the County needs to assume all fire protection at that time. Once this occurs, the building will fall under the auspices of HCFR who will immediately have a fully-staffed advanced life support engine running calls 24 hours a day 7 days a week from that location.
“We are able to reconfigure our existing resources to cover our new HCFR footprint,” Fire Chief Scott Hechler said. “There will be no additional cost to the Hernando Beach homeowners until October 1, 2017. At that time, they will pay the same as all other Hernando County residents.”
Both the County Attorney’s Office and Purchasing Department continue to work on details regarding inventory and documents within the building.
Comments
Lieutenant 51 says
Thats funny. We never had a problem running the department during early 2004 thru 2009 when I was an officer there. And the Medic (19) response from shoal line rd responded to all our calls. Seems that the department took a nose dive during the Frieda administration, staffing the department with a mear 16 members! You CAN NOT run a volunteer fire department convering that amount of square miles with such a limited amount of members. I personally spoke to the Chief and told them my concerns and was basically told to mind my own business. Chief Chichester should have taken the department back when Chief Knowlton retired, and called all of us who retired or resigned to come back and put that department back on track and make it the great department it once was. Very sad news!
Ex. Lieutenant 51
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