Fountain Hills Fire Chief Dave Ott has outlined a plan to upgrade his staff to support an application to have the department participate in the regional automatic aid program.
However, in a budget workshop on April 8, the town council deferred the required budget increases until January 2026 to offset some of the impact on the budget year that begins July 1, 2025.
Ott’s plan is to use a multi-year approach to upgrade staff, with no increases in personnel numbers, to support the automatic aid system. The plan proposes to promote three captains to the position of battalion chief so they might be called upon for command duties during automatic aid assignments. The year one budget for the three promotions, one on each shift, would be $222,441 to accommodate wage and benefit increases related to the battalion chief positions as well as the succession for the vacant captains and other positions where personnel would be moved up.
