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Glen Street Fire Station Must be Opened
The Money is Available, I will show you!

published in Rumbo 08/16/01

For more than 20 years the fire station on Glen Street has closed down. Every year since then, the fire chief has been trying to secure funds from the city council to reopen it. Every year the mayors of this city have told the fire chief (and the public) that there simply isn’t enough money make the fire house fully operational. And every year, like sheep lead to the slaughter house, we believe what we are told by our city leaders and accept what they tell us without looking into the matter ourselves.

Fire Chief Richard Schaffer recently appeared on my radio program on WCCM to talk about the issue of fire safety in the city and the closed station on Glen Street. He estimated that it would cost about $1 Million to train the men, purchase the equipment and fund a fully functional fire house.

$1 Million is not a lot of money when you take into consideration that last year alone the city of Lawrence received 15 million dollars from state lottery money. This lottery allocation can be used for whatever our city officials deem necessary. Our city leaders apparently have decided over the years that a fire station in South Lawrence isn’t necessary. Yet they campaign every year saying they will fight to open up Glen Street. We also receive millions of dollars in community development block grants. These are also funds, for the most part, which the city may use for anything our elected leaders choose to spend it on.

Each year, however, the city of Lawrence would rather spend millions of dollars on private corporations, youth programs and charities than public safety. I’m not saying these charities and youth programs are unimportant. I am saying we have to have our priorities in order. No responsible elected official would spend $34,655 for youth baseball leagues when a quarter of your population has no fire station to protect them. You don’t spend $34,000 for a community boating program when your streets and parks are in disrepair. You don’t spend $40,000 for the Feast of the Three Saints, $5,000 for The Irish Foundation, $277,000 for the political group Lawrence Community Works, $35,000 on Hoops for Hope, $27,129 to build a fence around a private school (Central Catholic,) $20,000 for Hispanic Week or $10,000 on The Council of Dominican Americans when your Fire Chief says the public is at risk and lives are in danger.

According to Chief Schaffer the lives of people of South Lawrence are at high risk without this station being open. We have a new industrial park off of Andover Street, new housing developments going up at the old Essem Plant on Beacon Street, a high elderly population in Mount Vernon and the nearest fire truck is at South Broadway near the falls bridge. "We were able to pull people out of a fire on Andover Street," the chief told me, "but they were overcome with smoke and they didn’t make it. If we had gotten there minutes earlier we may have been able to save them, it might have made a difference. Quicker response time is the difference between life and death."

Isn’t life and death a little more important than funding basketball leagues?

By cutting only the frills and I listed above, and diverting that money to the fire Department (more than $500,000) to open this station, the City of Lawrence has more than half the money needed to open a station that we have been told forever cannot be funded. And this is not even taking the $15 million dollars in free lottery money that comes in every year. I understand the need for helping our (privately run) ethnic festivals and youth programs and I completely understand why we give them additional funding beyond what they can raise themselves. But, these are things that we should only fund after the police, fire, roads and parks are fully taken care of. For us to continue to give out free money to private programs while our streets decay and the lives of people in Mount Vernon are at risk is more than ridiculous, it is downright irresponsible of our city leaders to let it continue.

With the election only a few months away, you as a voter, have an obligation to tell candidates that they must fund road repairs and public safety first, and worry about the frills later on. We need a Fire Station on Glen Street in South Lawrence. I have yet to find one person in this city who disagrees with that. But, with all of this agreement why isn’t anything being done? It doesn’t get done because it is easier to hand out money to feel good programs like baseball leagues and ethnic festivals than it is to tell these deserving charities that we cannot afford to help them because we are staffing a fire house first.

I think it is time we stop playing politics with the millions of dollars we spend on feel good programs and start acting like a city that wants move forward. There’s plenty of money in this city to fund a fire station on Glen Street. PLENTY! The real question is whether or not our City Council thinks it is more important than basketball camps and fences for private schools.