HILLSBOROUGH: Fire company throws out vote results after procedural concerns

Andrew Martins, Managing Editor
The results of a preliminary vote to determine whether more than $1.6 million in purchases should be included in the fire budget vote in February were immediately thrown out by officials after an error threw a wrench in the proceedings.
Last Thursday, the Hillsborough Township Board of Fire Commissioners of Fire District No. 1 held a special capital meeting and special election to gauge whether residents would be in favor of allowing the district to obtain a number of vehicles and new gear through the 2018 fire budget.
Though the board agreed that the meeting was conducted legally, officials said there were aspects of the meeting that did not adhere to existing protocols. So even though the vote ultimately showed that residents were in favor of the fire district’s plan with a final tally of 101-58, Nuara said that oversight invalidated the results.
“We didn’t want to have any issues, so we just decided to call the vote ‘null and void’ because we don’t want any legal issues,” Charlie Nuara, chairman of the Board of Fire Commissioners, said.
According to Nuara, the vote was never meant to be an official request for funding.
“We were working on our budget for the next year and we decided that we should put the items in now because we should be purchasing these things in 2019,” he said.
Residents who attended the event were presented with a handful of ballot questions that asked whether the fire district should be allowed to purchase a fire pumper truck for station 38 and a fire pumper/tanker truck for station 37, with each apparatus estimated to cost up to $725,000.
Additionally, the fire district showed interest in purchasing two SUVs or trucks to serve as fire support vehicles, which would total no more than $75,000 for the pair, and another $75,000 for the purchase of firefighter turnout gear. An additional $50,000 would also be needed, district officials said, for the purchase of two rescue boats.
For items like the two fire pumpers, Nuara said the vehicles are quickly reaching the end of their 20 year life expectancy, after which point maintenance costs tend to steadily increase.
Had the results not been discarded and the February vote was approved by residents, Nuara said the fire district would have potentially been able to have the requested items by 2019. With this setback, however, it won’t be until late 2019 or early 2020 until that happens.
Though the proposed purchase of the pumpers would have required residents to approve the fire district’s plan to go above the state-mandated cap on tax increases, Nuara said the other items were already planned to be included in the 2018 budget.
In the event that those items cannot be added to the 2018 budget without forcing an additional vote from residents, he said those items will be “pushed back to next year.”