The Melrose Messenger

Fire and Police to See Cost Savings and Cuts Next Year

By Ellen Putnam

The City Council’s Appropriations and Oversight Committee concluded this year’s budget hearings this week with a look at the Fire and Police departments, each of which will be affected in different ways by changes in next year’s budget.

Earlier this spring, the city announced that Melrose would be shifting from an in-house ambulance to a private ambulance contractor, Armstrong Ambulance. This change is not expected to affect response times, because the ambulance will operate out of the Fire Department’s headquarters on Main Street.

In theory, running the ambulance directly through the Fire Department could be a money-maker for the city, but in recent years, the Fire Department has had trouble hiring and retaining enough paramedics to fully staff the ambulance and also meet minimum staffing requirements for the Fire Department. This has led to ballooning overtime costs in the Fire Department: this fiscal year, overtime costs appear likely to exceed $1.5 million.

Moving to a private ambulance service will allow the fire department to eliminate the eight positions that had been dedicated to the ambulance. Through a combination of voluntary separations and shifting employees into existing vacancies, the Fire Department will be able to avoid layoffs while fully staffing every shift.

Fire Chief John White told the City Council, “Losing the ambulance is a net positive for the city in financial terms. We were losing money because we were having to pay so much overtime to staff it. The overtime costs have just been skyrocketing to fill all those spots.”

In recent years, he explained, many shifts have been staffed to the bare minimum, meaning that if even one person were sick or on leave, the department would need to use overtime or involuntary holdovers (where an employee is held past the end of their shift due to a lack of available personnel to take over) to meet staffing requirements. “In 2023 and 2024, we had over 700 holdovers,” he said, “and those were all paid overtime, but those were people who weren’t able to go home at the end of their shift.”

“I think now we’re going to have much more predictable scheduling and less overtime,” he went on. “Man-for-man overtime is grueling, and I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a bench - to not have the first person who’s on vacation or out sick cause overtime.”

Chief White concluded: “The Fire Department has been under-budgeted for a long, long time, and I believe we are finally now getting to a healthy footing.”

At the same time, lack of investment in the Fire Department’s capital needs may soon become a problem for the city.

“A frontline truck should be on the frontline for about ten to twelve years,” explained Chief White. “Our Engine 4, which is a spare, is from 2007, so that’s gone way past that. Next door, our Engine 3 is a 2010. We should have already ordered a new truck to replace our spare, but this year there was no capital expenditure in the budget, so we have to wait another year. Unfortunately, the manufacturers are so backed up, the last time I spoke with our representative, it was a 40-month wait once you sign a contract.” He noted that pump trucks “are now getting close to a million dollars a piece, and ladder trucks are about a million and a half, so there are some significant capital expenditures that we’re going to be coming across very soon.”

While the Fire Department is likely to see less staffing pressure next year, the Police Department is anticipating that they will see the opposite effect.

In order to make $2.6 million in budget cuts to city services for FY26, which begins in July, Mayor Jen Grigoraitis’ administration offered a voluntary separation incentive to city employees. One police officer took the buyout and another left for another department, leaving two vacancies that will not be filled due to budget constraints.

“The result of this reduction,” Police Chief Kevin Faller explained in his department’s budget memo, “will be increased overtime costs, reduction in staffing on the street, and hindering future goals to add an additional traffic enforcement officer or specialty position.”

“Two officers, at face value, may not sound like a lot,” Chief Faller told the City Council, “but for a department our size and what we’re strategically trying to do moving forward, it is. I mean, it’s roughly 6% of our patrol force.”

“As you all know,” he went on, “it’s very difficult to fill positions, and it’s very unusual to see public safety being cut. Agencies are having a difficult time finding qualified officers, where we’re actually eliminating officers.” Training a new police officer is both a long and resource-intensive process: in addition to spending six months at the police academy, new officers require three months of field training before they’re ready to work independently.

Chief Faller noted that, in addition to leave time for sickness or injury, including potentially on the job, several Melrose police officers are also members of the military or the National Guard, and are sometimes gone for training or even months-long deployments. When officers are out on leave, other members of the department need to step in, and this can lead to overtime costs when the department is minimally staffed.

Among a number of cuts to budget items, the Police Department will see a 20% reduction in Training. “That’s going to hurt,” said Chief Faller, “because training is big to me. Anything that goes to sending officers to classes that aren’t mandated by the state - extra training, like sexual assault training, crime scene, investigative training - we’re going to hurt there.”

Among the other departments who presented their budgets in the last week was the Council on Aging, which is seeing an almost 10%, or $20,000, reduction in its budget.

“We’ve seen a large increase in daily attendance at the Milano Center this year,” said Council on Aging Director Erica Brown. “We are averaging about 94 different people a day coming into the building. When I started, back in 2021, that number was around 50.”

But instead of increasing the budget to reflect this increase in attendees, the Council on Aging will be moving the department’s van drivers’ salaries off of the city budget onto state grant money “in order to support the city’s budgetary constraints. This will have direct implications for programming,” Brown explained, “because that fund is usually what we pull from to fund programs. We may have to rely more heavily on other grant opportunities going forward, though some of our existing grant funding is up in the air due to the federal administration changes. We’ll do our very best not to pass costs onto our participants, but this may look like scaling back a little bit on programming.”

Posted June 12th, 2025