Why city council members balked at disbanding fire department

Westminster Councilman Charles Miller who sided with three other colleagues in rejecting the chance to balance the city budget by disbanding the fire department and relying instead on Oconee Emergency Services for protection inside the corporate limits has given reasons for the opposition.  As it is, however, Miller and a majority of the rest of his colleagues have enacted a balanced budget that maintains a fire department with fewer fire fighters.  But the uproar this year’s budget process created, according to Miller, has torn his city apart.  He makes the following appeal:  “We as the citizens need to remain calm and come together to support the decisions that were laid in our laps and hard decisions they were.  There have been many sleepless hours and many lives affected, and if we work together we can pull ourselves of the hole our forefathers left us in, and become the great city we once were.  We didn’t get into this mess overnight and we sure as heck can’t get out of it overnight….”  Miller said if the county absorbed the municipal fire department, Westminster fire fighters would have to apply to stay in their jobs and would lose the ranks that they have invested time and effort in.  “It would be the same as asking a General to take a demotion to a Private,” Miller says. Miller was reluctant to cede to the county a municipal fire department whose origins date back to the 1920s.  About the municipal department, Miller says, “They provide extra services to our City at no cost to include washing down the streets before and after Festivals, they wash down the streets for our water department when they get mud in the roads during a water line break, they provide water to our sewer department when they need water to flush a blockage down the sewer.  They also perform a service on the hydrants, such as flow, paint, and test to meet ISO and DHEC regulations….”