Heather Wright/The Independent

Plympton-Wyoming Councillor Mike Vasey is worried the local fire department is becoming the training ground for full-time fire services; and it’s costing the town money.

Plympton-Wyoming Fire Chief Will Davidson presented the 2025 year-end report during the May 15 council meeting. It included statistics on response time including the fact that 74 per cent of the structure fires PW fire attends are within the provincial standards for response time.

The document also included the final financial figures for the year. The fire department was $178,000 over budget in 2025. The biggest drivers of the increase, firefighter wages, which were about $112,000 over budget and training, which required almost double the amount budgeted – $245,130 in all.

Those increases were offset by lower spending in other areas, including saving for new fire trucks, said Vasey, the fire chief turned councillor.

“I’m frustrated with the fact that fire is over budget every year, and we keep saying we’re going to bring it in line. We’re over budget by (over) $100,000. I think we put about that much in for the reserves for a new truck. We’re never going to get there, because we keep taking the money and paying our budget off,” Vasey said.

“We don’t let any other department run with this much of a deficit year over year over year,” Vasey said adding “I don’t understand how we can’t figure this out.”

Vasey pointed to the increase costs of training as one of the problems, asking for a detailed report of what is being done. He suspects there has been a large turnover of members, adding to the training burden costs.

“It seems like that all we do is constantly train people and we’re never catching up. We’re never full.

“If we’re training guys to leave for full-time fire positions, maybe we need to shift our thoughts on who we’re hiring,” Vasey continued.

“We’re just becoming a training ground, costing us 1000s upon 1000s of dollars to train somebody for them to leave to go make $150,000 in London…Things change in your life, I understand all that, but it seems more and more, it’s just a revolving door, which is costing it at the municipality.

Chief Davidson says the department does do exit interviews when firefighters leave and some do leave to become full-time firefighters.

“That is the reality in small-town Ontario. Some people do choose to seek full-time employment at fire departments, and I have said for years that you know we’re very fortunate to have them, and the reality of all of this is, there’s a lot of people trying to get
those jobs, and very few of them get them.

“Sometimes we keep them here as well, live in our community, work in our work in the city, and volunteer on our fire department as well. So that’s a win-win for us.”

Councillor Kristen Rodrigues suggested the municipality make volunteers stay for a minimum of three to five years to make use of their training. If they left before that, she suggested, they would have to pay the cost back.

The chief strongly recommended against that adding in the last few years, the extra load of increased training to meet new provincial standards has tipped the scales towards leaving for some members.

“We had a lot of firefighters who had to make the decision whether they wanted to be certified or not,” he said, adding now that the training deadline is near, fewer should be leaving.

“It’s not going to be like it was 20 years ago, where people stayed on for half a century…

“We just will not have a workforce like that anymore. It’s a little bit more dynamic, people’s lives are busier, people have other commitments, and the volunteer fire service has to evolve any job and adjust accordingly, “ he said.

“So we will have some more turnover than we used to have, but we’ll have less than what we saw as we reached the certification deadlines.”