Our Volunteers Deserve Better by Bernie Ziegler deserves to be posted on this bulletin board, not buried in some committee/board or its self-edited minutes. Remember, there was a time when posts like this appeared on our Saturna General Store bulletin board (years ago), but that was before we had 53 groups/committees, endless calls for volunteers, like we do now. Our Volunteers Deserve Better by Bernie Ziegler On a Sunday morning in July, I attended the first meeting of the new board of directors of the Saturna Island Fire Protection Society (SIFPS). I went there to see how the recently-elected directors planned to handle the issue of a dental and supplemental medical benefit plan for Saturnas firefighters and ambulance attendants, proposed by the previous SIFPS board of directors, of which I was a member. The facts: On other Southern Gulf Islands, volunteer firefighters and ambulance attendants are paid for call-outs and training time. On Saturna they are not. The reason for that is that Saturnas property tax base is too small and property owners on Saturna simply cannot afford this cost. Fair enough. On other Southern Gulf Islands, these volunteers also benefit from a dental and supplemental health benefit programme, funded through those islands property taxes. Saturnas emergency services volunteers do not currently have access to such benefits. The minimum cost for such a proposal is roughly $20,000 per year. Its implementation means that property tax assessment for fire protection on Saturna would remain at or slightly below current taxation levels for the foreseeable future. The funds to underwrite this plan are there now. The question: Should Saturna property taxes fund a dental and supplemental health benefit plan for Saturnas volunteer firefighters and ambulance attendants and their families, as is the case for volunteers on other Southern Gulf Islands? The catch: At its June 2014 Annual General Meeting (AGM), members of the SIFPS endorsed in principle a proposal put forward by the societys previous board of directors to establish a dental and supplemental medical benefit plan for Saturnas volunteer firefighters and ambulance crew. Who, exactly, are the volunteers who would benefit from this proposed largesse? There are currently 20 some volunteer firefighters and ambulance attendants on Saturna. Many of them hold down two or three jobs to eke out a living on this island. They volunteer their time, skills, energy and commitment to serve this community, to serve us. They are our neighbours. They do not have generous government or corporate pensions or a business or large land holdings to fall back on, if they need cash to cover expensive dental work for themselves or their kids. We are not talking about cosmetic treatments here, but things like painful root canal infections. Some even had to rely on local service organizations, like the Lions or the Firefighters Association, for financial help to get relief from pain. This idea didnt sit well with the board of the Saturna Island Property Owners Association (SIPOA), which earlier this year put out a disquisition to its members which fretted that once the construction debt for Saturnas new emergency services buildings was paid off, “a tax-funded organization as SIFPS redirected those now surplus funds to other projects.” At the AGM, one of the founding SIPOA members and a major Saturna property owner and builder stood up and declared that his property tax bill for fire protection on his bare land caused him major hardship and was threatening his retirement plans. Translation: I want those “surplus” funds back in my pocket. Dont waste my money on some bleeding-heart benefit scheme – give those volunteers a pair of pliers to fix their dental problems. This property owner showed up with his clan and a coterie of SIPOA hangers-on in tow to make sure that he had sufficient votes at the meeting to oust the previous officers of SIFPS and elect a new slate, willing to do SIPOAs bidding, under the slogan of “New Leadership With More Transparency”. Some at this meeting called this a witch hunt. But lets put credit where credit is due: in a democracy if you have the votes, you win. By the way, the newly-elected SIFPS board includes the above property owners son and two others, also directors of SIPOA, including the vice president, who is the treasurer of SIPOA, and the secretary, who is also the president of SIPOA and sits on the board of that other private club, the Saturna Cultural and Recreation Centre Society (SCRCS). This is the same person who penned the SIPOA expose on “surplus” property tax dollars. Whats the significance of this, you ask? It means that the same miserly clique which balks at funding a benefit plan for our volunteers now controls all three organizations. They seem to care only for their own, everyone else is adrift at sea. Fast forward to the new SIFPS boards first meeting, where the benefit proposal for our volunteers was duly brought up and quickly delegated to the boards Human Resources Committee. That committee includes the same directors who also sit on the board of SIPOA and SCRCS. Stay tuned. The previous SIFPS boards time-line called for the benefit proposal to be implemented by September 2014, as discussed at the AGM. Alas, this is not going to happen, because the new board saw no need for rushing this matter and scheduled its next meeting for September 20. Whats more, the lukewarm enthusiasm for this initiative expressed by members of the boards Human Resources Committee tells me that they will likely try to bury this idea under bureaucratic twaddle in the hope that it will disappear in the resulting fog. The answer: A pair of pliers? I think not. If I were a volunteer firefighter or ambulance attendant on Saturna and I cared about this issue, I would attend every SIFPS board meeting and keep this topic front and center, to make sure the proposed benefit measure doesnt get “disappeared” under a pile of piffle. I would suggest that other residents who value our volunteers do the same. However, this might prove difficult, because one of the first things this new board did was to eliminate questions from the floor from their official agenda. This looks to me to be an attempt by the apparatchiks of the “New Leadership” to discourage unwelcome comments or questions from the community during meetings. As a Saturna resident and property owner, I believe that our volunteer fire fighters and rescue crew, who readily give of their time and efforts to protect us from potential harm and to help us when we do sustain injuries or fall ill, deserve our unequivocal backing. And if that means keeping our property taxes for fire protection at their current level and making a nuisance of ourselves at SIFPS meetings, I am for it. I believe we should support our volunteers and bring their status somewhat closer to that of volunteers on other Southern Gulf Islands.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 15:15:24 +0000
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