St. Charles Countryside Fire District: 'A world of hurt'

The St. Charles Countryside Fire Protection District on a map “looks like a face,” but it’s the “ears” giving the district financial trouble, said Julia Glas, the district’s sole employee – a part-time administrator.

Fire officials say the district is 56 square miles; the ears are the 34 square miles that project outside the city to the west and east. The ears include unincorporated Campton and Wayne townships.

Providing emergency and fire protection service to the district’s ears is forcing the fire protection district into bankruptcy, said Terry Jeglum, a fire protection district trustee. 

“We’re in a world of hurt,” Jeglum said. “We’ll be broke by 2012 if nothing changes.”

The ears of the district have about 21,000 residents and about 6,600 households and are serviced by the city’s fire department, which has three fire stations. The district pays the city $1.7 million a year for fire protection and emergency services.

Glas said the fire protection district has one part-time employee, which is herself. It owns a desk, a phone, a computer and “fireproof” file cabinets that are kept inside a city’s fire station near City Hall.

“We’re a paper organization,” she said.

Jeglum said city residents pay city taxes for their own city fire service. But those living outside the city and inside the district channel a portion of their real estate taxes to the city for fire protection. The problem is response time. Fire trucks take longer to get to the outlying areas, in some cases response time is 14 minutes. 

Five minutes and longer for an ambulance and 10 minutes and longer for a fire truck is a cause for concern, fire officials said.

The fire protection district is asking residents for a tax hike Tuesday to help pay for a new fire station, the first outside the city.

Fire officials are asking real estate taxpayers who own a $350,000 home to pay $156 more a year to pay for a $2 million fire station proposed for a two-acre site east of La Fox and Burlington roads.

Fire officials said the two acres for the new station – worth about $1.5 million – was donated to the district by a developer.

The proposed tax hike would allow the district to staff the station with five firefighters. The station would be open 24 hours each day and would have an ambulance, a pumper and a tanker trucks. Jeglum said the district hopes emergency response times would be reduced from its average of 12 minutes in some outlaying areas.

Officials said the new station on the west side of the district would be the start of a process to build a second station outside the city limits on the east side of the district.

Jeglum stressed the most important thing is getting firefighting apparatuses closer to homes in outlying areas. 

“When the fire department gets there, they do a great job,” Jeglum said. “But we need to bring equipment closer to the residents.”

Details of the referendum can be found on the St. Charles Countryside Fire Protection District Web site, www.sccfpd.org.