Audit needed to determine if Ketchum owes money to rural fire department
By Eric Valentine
Concern that payments for fire equipment usage have been wrongly diverted into the City of Ketchum’s general fund, rather than to the Ketchum Rural Fire District, is triggering the call for an independent audit. In addition, rural fire district commissioners may conduct their own audit. And so far, Ketchum city officials are showing they are on board with it by starting an internal audit on their own.
The audit the city is performing is on fires to which Ketchum personnel responded with rural fire district equipment outside the rural fire district area. It will be presented to the commissioners of the rural district when it’s complete, Ketchum’s Assistant City Administrator Lisa Enourato said.
“I think they feel they owe that to us. I think they also need to explain why the money went into their general fund and not their fire department,” Ketchum Rural Fire District Commissioner Jed Gray said.
Gray said he had “some concern” the Sharps Fire payment may not have been an anomaly, but that audits would enable the two fire jurisdictions to clear things up and square up, if needed.
In question is reimbursement from the U.S. government for last summer’s Sharps Fire—a mammoth 35,000-acre blaze that began east of Bellevue, in Sharps Canyon, that required use of the rural fire district’s equipment, namely its engines. Rather than paying the city and rural fire departments on a cost-by-cost basis, the feds sent the monies to the City of Ketchum in one lump sum. From there, it was deposited into Ketchum’s general fund. As it stands now, Gray estates that the city owes its rural counterpart between $5,000 and $6,000 for the rentals.
Adding fuel to the fire
All this potentially complicates efforts to rework the contract for shared emergency services that has tied Ketchum’s rural and city fire fighting together for decades. Last week—in a decision essentially unrelated to the Sharps Fire issue—Ketchum Rural Fire District opted to terminate its contract for emergency services with the City of Ketchum. The move triggered a now in-play 90-day waiting period before final termination, opening the door to enter into a new contract with the City of Sun Valley or a revised contract with Ketchum—or a little of both.
Sun Valley already presented the rural fire district with their offer, but a meeting date for commissioners to discuss it is yet to be determined.
“My sense is to not act on the Sun Valley contract until we have a Ketchum contract in front of us,” Gray said. “We need to weigh each.”
The Gray area
Commissioner Gray made his goals clear in no uncertain terms this week during an interview with The Weekly Sun. Gray said he’d like to see Ketchum come to the table with a contract that’s in the best interest of both the city and rural fire departments, and to then approach Sun Valley for further integration of the entire Valley’s emergency services.
“The biggest issue of all is that Ketchum has spent zero dollars since 2004 on new engines and they have an engine that is nearly inoperable. They’ve been relying on our equipment and $330,000 of funding for personnel for a long time. They need to figure this out,” Gray said.
