FARMINGTON, N.M. - Police and fire budgets in Farmington are tighter now than ever, leading workers to train more often within their departments and less often outside of the city for more specialized instruction.
Budget cuts at the fire department this year will continue next fiscal year and have stopped the department from funding travel for firefighters to get outside training, said Deputy fire Chief Terry Page.
He said firefighters in units such as the hazardous materials and technical rescue teams must pay for their own specialized training outside the city. That's a deterrent for some firefighters, while others treat it as volunteer work.
"Our guys are still as highly qualified as they were before," he said. "We're still able to give our guys the knowledge, we're just not able to send them out to a different location to hear what's the latest cutting-edge stuff.
Firefighters also must find other firefighters to cover their shifts if the training takes place when they are scheduled to work because the department won't pay overtime for that.
Meanwhile, the police department's travel budget has dropped from about $40,000 during past years to about $8,000, Farmington police Chief Jim Runnels said.
"We've still been able to provide a substantial amount of training," Runnels said. "What we have done though is we really scrutinize the classes we send people to."
He said instead of sending officers out of state like in the past, the department sends them only throughout New Mexico.
"The good news is because we had been able to do so much of that over the past years, a lot of our officers have a lot of specialized training," he said. "We've curtailed a lot of the more expensive training, but I feel comfortable in the training we've been able to provide."
At a recent city council meeting, Councilwoman Mary Fischer asked the city to spend more on training, saying the city has cut public safety training budgets tremendously.
"What they've been doing lately, which is admirable, is trying to do a lot of internal training," she said. "But that can only take you so far. There's times when you have to get different opinions, different ways of doing things from the outside."
Fischer said the city can find the money for more outside training by cutting the budget of the Farmington Public Library, which she said receives more funding compared with other libraries in similar-sized cities.
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Information from: the Farmington Daily Times,
http://www.daily-times.com/
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