Clancy Fire Department seeks fee increase

Clancy residents may soon pay about 50 percent more for fire protection under a proposed rate increase from the Clancy Volunteer Fire Department. 

Chief Tracy Leibbrandt made the case for higher rates at a public meeting on July 7—increasing annual fees from $98 to $145 a year to cover the cost of maintaining and modernizing the department. The last fee increase was in 2015, when it rose from $50 a year to the current $95 rate. He said that increasing revenue to the department would allow it to more consistently maintain and update equipment.

“In the last year, we’ve updated our self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBAs) … [because] our old ones were several years out of date and basically unreliable,” Leibbrandt said at the meeting. “In history, when we have responded to automobile fires in the rural area of our district, we would take brush trucks and none of our brush trucks had SCBAs on them. So we increased our number of SCBAs to put on those brush trucks when we respond to those fires so our members have full protection.”