MILES CITY- As soon as the emergency tones ring, lights ignite, and sirens sound off and Miles City firefighters find themselves responding to yet another emergency.
Many times, they respond to medical calls for help beyond city limits and into county lines.
“They will step up, they will answer the calls,” said Miles City Firefighters Union President Casey Miller.
The department is already in need of firefighters and down three positions, not to mention an open chief position.
Miller says, shifts are working with short staff already, and now they’re in a hiring freeze.
“We’re just, we’re getting tapped out,” he said.
But Miller says it doesn’t have to be this way.
“It seems like on a regular basis we have to justify our existence, to the hire ups,” he said.
Although there’s a solution in sight, firefighters are still reporting to duty at a station in dire need of repair, after it was deemed unsafe by building inspectors in 2018.
Fortunately, voters approved a bond to fund the rebuild the dilapidated fire station, but Miller says now they’re dealing another bump in the road.
“We still feel like the money should be shared,” said Miller.
He’s referring to an intense battle in Custer County over $6.2 million dollars in impact fees coming from the state’s largest wind farm, the Clearwater Wind Project.
The project spans three Montana counties and with as many as 300 wind turbines towering as tall as 40 feet snaking through Garfield, Rosebud and Custer counties.
City of Miles City union members such as Miller, along with those represented by the city parks department and the police department, are concerned the money isn’t being properly shared.
“Is it going to be used as a bail out?” said Miller. “Yeah, it’s going to be used to fully staff your police department and your fire department.”
However, the board of commissioners who was given the $6.2 million because the wind project presides inside the bounds of county land, say they’re not interested in helping the city with a budget deficit bailout.
“These are one-time dollars,” said Custer County Commission Chair Jason Strouf.
Strouf wants to make sure the money is spent responsibly.
“Once that money is spent there is no coming back as far as impact fees,” he said.
Miles City Mayor Dwyane Andrews confirmed through a phone call with MTN News that the city is indeed in a budget crisis.
He says, there’s a few reasons for it, saying departments had little professional oversight over their budgets and overspent over the years. He says secondly, cost of living raises for union members increased the city’s expenditures and third, previous city leaders overestimated the budget’s revenue.
Strouf says, after some back-and-forth negotiations on the wind project impact fees in combination with discussion of an annual inter-local agreement between the city and county on the table, city leaders asked the county for $1.2 million from the wind project money.
However, commissioners say their best and final offer to the city is $200,000.
That’s roughly 3 percent of the pie, even though the city of Miles City saw the brunt of the ripple effect from the construction of the wind farm, according to union leaders.
“Seventy-five percent of Custer County residents are within the city of Miles City bubble,” said Hannah Nash a spokesperson for the AFSCME Local union.
Nash says the impact from city services was huge.
“And it was a lot of officer man hours a lot of dispatch and of course that trickles all the way up the system,” she said.
Mayor Andrews acknowledged the potential cuts to police and fire and faults the previous administration for not paying close enough attention to the city’s budget, but said he is “paying attention now.”
However, Strouf says, the budget crisis of the city, is not the problem of the county.
“If a government has repetitive issues in regard to creating a budget, managing a budget and balancing a budget and you put one time money into that, without seeing exactly how that’s going to get taken care of and corrected, what’s to make you think it’s not going to happen the year after, or the year after.” said Strouf.
Instead, commissioner would like to see the $6.2 million be put toward the creation of a senior citizen center.
“The senior citizens are one of the largest demographic populations that we have here in Custer County, and they’ve never had their own facility that has multiple different services directly related to seniors,” he said.
However, Miller believes the county will place residents further into harm’s way without a fair share of the money.
“The population is aging and so we are busier than we have ever been,” said Miller. “Every year our call volume goes up by hundreds of calls.”
While union members say, they’re just asking for what’s fair… Strouf maintains the board is not interested in getting involved in the mismanagement of the city’s budget.
“If the city can’t manage its funds, why would you give them money to balance their budget with?” he said.
