At the Brookfield trustees’ April 2 department head meeting, Fire Chief David Masirovits said he had given up on his desire to buy a new fire truck this year but wanted to stick with the plan to buy an ambulance. Five days later, when the trustees took a vote on the plan, Trustees Shannon Devitz and Mark Ferrara supported it, but Trustee Dan Suttles voted against it.
The department is down to two trucks designed primarily for fighting fires, a ladder truck and a pumper/tanker truck. Masirovits had budgeted taking out a loan to buy a “simple, plain” tanker to the tune of at least $800,000 but told the trustees April 2 that he does not believe the department will be able to afford loan payments in the coming years.
While getting a fire truck still is a priority, the department is in a better position to buy an ambulance, Masirovits said. The ambulance approved by the trustees costs $152,260 but manufacturer Penn Care has agreed to take the department’s oldest ambulance, a 2021 model, in trade at a value of $52,260, making the purchase price of a 2025 ambulance $100,000, the chief said.
By purchasing a new ambulance, the oldest of three ambulances on the road would be a 2023 model.
“Looking down the road, if we can maintain these three ambulances for a minimum of the next five years, that will allow us to save money to put more money towards a fire truck,” Masirovits said.
Ferrara said $100,000 is “a lot of money” and he left the department head meeting “waffling” as to which way to go.
“To the chief’s credit, he explained that 85 percent of our runs throughout the year are emergency-medical related,” Ferrara said. “So, our ambulances get a lot of use. Not knowing what’s coming down the road in a year or two, that price could be considerably higher.”
Medical calls made up 80 percent of the department’s responses in 2024; 74.5 percent in 2023.
The department’s fire trucks “will be another subject for another time,” Ferrara said. “We really have to sit down and talk about what the future is for those trucks.”
The time is now to discuss fire trucks, Suttles said.
“We need EMS vehicles, but we need not to forget that our number one is fire department,” he said. “We’re fire first.”
Suttles said the current fleet of ambulances is solid and he would rather the $100,000 dedicated to a new ambulance be put into the fire truck fund the trustees authorized the creation of last year.
Suttles said he doesn’t want to run the older ambulance into the ground but noted the department only runs two at a time and rotates which two are in use. “However the fire department does the rotation, I would rather the fire department put that ambulance back a couple cycles and run the other two.”
The possibility of asking voters for new money for the fire department, something the chief suggested last summer, is not far from the minds of the trustees.
“If you start doing things early in the game, you might not get to that place where you have to ask for money,” Suttles said of a levy request.
Devitz alluded to Masirovits “over budgeting” in the 2025 budget when she asked, “He budgeted a lot of things that he might not use, so we could still, possibly, this year, put away $100,000 for a fire truck, correct?”
“Yes, I believe so,” Masirovits said.
Suttles turned that around and said the department could wait for six months to buy an ambulance if expenses proceed in a favorable fashion mid-way through the year.
“We all see what’s happening nationally with tariffs,” Devitz responded. “I’m concerned that the price of this ambulance is going to be huge in six months, a year, whenever we’re ready to do it.”
Masirovits said Penn Care has told him a price hike is looming.
Concerning ambulances, Masirovits said, “We tend to buy on the cheaper end,” and said other ambulance companies spend $200,000 to $300,000 on certain models. The purchase price does not take into account the $80,000 to $100,000 it costs to add equipment to an ambulance. The department will be able to load the new ambulance with equipment from the traded-in model and the only additional expense will be to have decals placed on the new truck, which will be around $7,500, the chief said.
