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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 |
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Fireworks ban putting pinch on a local VFD
Published December 18, 2008
SEGUIN — County Line Volunteer Fire Department Chief Bill Gebhardt will take his hat in hand today and go to First Commercial Bank hoping for help because he can’t pay for his pumper truck or his ambulance, and has a $7,000 note due in January.
He also has to make a down payment on a new truck he hopes to secure through the Texas Forest Service, and if he doesn’t get that money within a couple weeks, he’ll lose a $70,000 grant.
Gebhardt’s problem?
His nearly five-year-old volunteer fire department that made itself famous selling fireworks to pay for fire trucks got put out of the fireworks business this year with two disaster declarations and fireworks bans that closed down the July 4 fireworks season and will now shut him down over the New Year’s selling season, which would have begun at 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
“We lost about $8,000 in July, and we’re going to lose that much or more in January,” Gebhardt said. “I’m not mad at anybody. I understand the situation. But I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
After working with venders for weeks to try arrive at a compromise solution in which Gebhardt and other vendors would have been able to sell fireworks for four days to folks who agreed to fire them off on only one day in three safe zones located in different areas of the county, County Judge Mike Wiggins pulled the plug on the idea early Wednesday after learning commissioners, Sheriff Arnold Zwicke and the county’s volunteer fire chiefs didn’t support the plan.
Guadalupe County Emergency Management Coordinator Dan Kinsey said he and Wiggins favored trying the safe zone idea, but they couldn’t do it in a vacuum — and Wiggins was unwilling to do it without the support of his colleagues in county government.
“We tried to do right by everyone, but the situation in Bexar County dictated what we have to do,” Kinsey said.
Bexar County issued a disaster declaration and a 60-hour total fireworks ban that Gov. Rick Perry extended through the New Year’s weekend Tuesday afternoon.
One of the proposed Guadalupe County safe zones was at San Antonio Raceway near Marion, just a few miles up Interstate 10 from the Bexar County line.
Kinsey said most of the counties around this one would be banning fireworks completely. If that happens as expected and Guadalupe County is one of say, only two counties in the region allowing sales and use, what happens at the safe zones?
“Both the judge and I believe in the safe zone concept, but under the right conditions,” Kinsey said. “We were looking at three or four safe zones for our residents. But when you’re looking at almost all of your surrounding counties doing a complete ban, you can reasonably expect their folks to head our way. When you multiply our potential population by 15 or 16 times, you’re creating a situation that has the potential for going south in a hurry. If you potentially double, triple or quadruple the number of people using a safe zone, it’s not the ideal condition under which to begin a new program..”
Alamo Fireworks President Michael Girdley said his company is suing Bexar County and will soon sue Guadalupe County over lost revenues from the upcoming fireworks season — not for his company, but on behalf of the non-profits and civic groups, such as County Line Volunteer Fire Department, that depend on income from fireworks sales.
“As a for-profit business, we’re not asking anything for ourselves,” Girdley said Wednesday afternoon. “But we think that any county that’s going so far as to declare a disaster needs to help the people who are victims of the disaster,” Girdley said. “The county has funds for this, and they also have a legal obligation to help disaster victims. It’s in the law, and they know the law because they’re using it in this situation.”
In Bexar County, Girdley’s seeking $400,000. He doesn’t know yet how much he will seek from Guadalupe County.
“We owe it to these groups and families to get them some help,” Girdley said. “As county leaders embraced people from Houston and Louisiana in the recent storms, they should help the people who live here.”
Kinsey acknowledged Girdley could well sue. But he said he was unconcerned.
“We’ll be in court for 60 to 90 minutes like we were in July,” Kinsey said. “It’s very clear we have the right to do what we’ve done, and this is ironic because of all these counties that have banned or will be banning fireworks, we’re the county that worked with the industry to try to come up with a solution.”
Kinsey doubts Girdley’s motives the same way he came to when, while he was working on safe zones with four vendors, Girdley circulated a memo to the vendors he says he’s trying to help now, offering them prizes to call county officials.
“I think the fireworks industry has sensationalized this,” Kinsey said. “Mr. W Fireworks called me last night saying we were putting a 50-year-old, family owned business out of business. The reality is they do business in three states. They didn’t say anything about Bexar County. We have 1/15th the population, and we’re going to put them out of business?”
Kinsey said he and Wiggins tried in good faith to work out a compromise and will do so again.
“We’ve tried hard,” Kinsey said. “Chester Davis from American Fireworks and Dusty Farrell of Big Tex Fireworks are both stand-up guys who were working really hard on this, and we feel really badly for shutting them down. Alamo’s bad-mouthing us, saying they’ve spent all this money. The fact is, they showed up at one meeting and their company didn’t sponsor any of our safe zones.”
If blame should be pointed anywhere, Kinsey said, he believed it was Alamo Fireworks, for seeking to politicize the issue through its phone call campaign, which it began while ostensibly working with the county on the safe zone solution.
“I’m sure many commissioners received numerous phone calls on this issue — and virtually none came from residents of this county who thought we shouldn’t ban fireworks. Why did that happen? Because Alamo Fireworks tried to stack the deck. Once that happened and the word got out, we were overwhelmed with calls, and none were in favor of allowing fireworks.”
McQueeney Volunteer Fire Department Chief Tim Bogisch and New Berlin Volunteer Fire Chief Kurt Strey are two of those who favored a total ban.
“Very simply, if it’s too dry to burn, it is too dry to pop!” Strey said. “The judge had a very difficult decision to make, one that will most definitely anger someone. I think the judge made the right decision in the interest of this county and its residents.”
Their colleague, Gebhardt, also sat in Tuesday’s commissioner’s court meeting, and said he gets it, too.
“I’m a fireman, and I understand their side of it,” Gebhardt said. “I know what we had last January with those fires, and I know how bad it was.
For now, he’s making ends meet — just barely — and he hopes he can get a little help at the bank. In the long term, like everybody else, Gebhardt hopes for a few days of evenly spaced, soaking rains between now and spring.
“Hopefully, we’ll have something better in July,” Gebhardt said. “Who knows? We’ve been in drought for a long time, but maybe we’ll have a flood by then. That’s the way it is in Texas.”
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