To help ease overtime costs, the Yakima Fire Department hopes to hire and begin training four new firefighters as early as next month.
“When we have people out with the flu or a strained back or other injuries on any given day — that reduces our capacity,” said Yakima Fire Chief Bob Stewart. “What happens is we have to go into our overtime funding to fill those vacant positions. These new firefighters provide us a buffer before we have to go use our overtime funding.”
The plan, however, must still be approved by the Yakima City Council.
Three of the four would be partly funded through 2020 by a federal grant. The fourth would fill an already-existing and budgeted vacancy. The city of Yakima was awarded the grant in August, but didn’t immediately accept it because hiring firefighters would have hurt the city’s effort to rebuild ailing reserve funds, Stewart said.