Multiple false fire alarms to get costly

PALMER — If your home smoke detectors are prone to crying wolf while you’re not around, now would be a good time to get them fixed.

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough on Tuesday adopted an ordinance to allow fire departments to levy fines for false alarms.

Dennis Brodigan, the borough’s director of emergency services, said a lot of homes have detectors set to dial 911 automatically. He said most people are responsible about it — if a false alarm brings engines and tankers to their home they’ll have their system serviced. But some aren’t as responsible.

“Some people will have it happen time and time again thinking it’s a lot less expensive to do it that way,” Brodigan said.

But it’s expensive for the borough.

“When we roll a tanker or an engine we’re burning dollars and for situations that shouldn’t occur,” he said.

Of course there are measures in place to keep from penalizing the responsible. For instance, the first false alarm is free.

But the second will cost $150, the third $175, and so on up to the tenth call, which will cost $350, with a $400 charge for each false alarm after that.

The fee schedule applies to borough fire departments, which includes, basically, anything but Palmer and Houston. According to Palmer’s director of Emergency Services Jon Owen, the city has had a fee schedule in place for sometime. It works just like the borough’s new system but each call is, for the most part, $25 cheaper. The one exception is for false alarms 11 and above. For those, Palmer charges the same $400 rate as the Borough. Houston, said fire chief Tom Hood, doesn’t charge for false alarms.

But unlike Palmer’s fees, the borough’s new fee schedule also had measures to charge drivers whose cars catch fire in the borough but don’t live here.

“We had a trend going where a lot of them were Anchorage residents or people from out of state driving their recreational vehicle through,” Brodigan said. “We’re expending taxpayer money to go out and fight those fires.”

Those costs vary by the type of response. For instance, a fire engine costs $220 for the first hour and $110 for each additional hour.

But the piece that Brodigan said he’s most excited about is a fee schedule for burn piles that turn into wildfires.

Right now, he said, the Division of Forestry can cite people for fire response. Forestry often recoups its costs through fining negligent burners, but, before Tuesday, the borough had to pay out of fire department budgets whenever it responded to fires.

“[Forestry’s] statistics are 94 percent of the wildfires that are started in Alaska are started by people that are doing unlawful burns.”

Now, he said, taxpayers won’t have to foot as much of the bill if their neighbor negligently sets the woods on fire. But the borough will only charge those people who Forestry cites as negligent. The charge is either $275 or $470, depending on the seriousness of the blaze.

Palmer, by contrast, does not charge for wildfire response.

Brodigan said that, in addition to hopefully curbing some problems — unattended burns and false alarms — the fees are another way to diversify borough revenue.

As the borough assembly hashed out its budget this year, Brodigan said, it became clear they were looking for ways to cut down on property taxes.

“We’re looking for fees to generate additional revenue so that they can continue the lower areawide taxes,” he said.

Charging for false alarms and the wildfires had been an idea his department was kicking around for four or five years, he said.

“These were kind of the hot button issues that we’ve had anyway,” Brodigan said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.