Jack Birch will serve as legal representation for the Warsaw-Wayne Fire Protection Territory after the territory’s board approved the contract at their meeting Tuesday.
The Warsaw Board of Public Works and Safety also must approve the contract at their meeting Friday morning.
Birch replaces Andrew Grossnickle as the territory’s attorney as Grossnickle stepped down at the end of last year.
In presenting the contract for Birch’s services, Fire Chief Joel Shilling said Birch was asking for a $3,000 retainer fee and a $250-per-hour rate.
“But with that retainer fee, that’s going to cover some of the simple phone calls that I have. Just minor contract work, and stuff like that. And then any major work will be $250 an hour for up to 10 hours,” Chief Shilling said. “And the reason we capped it at the 10 hours is because, with doing it a little bit different and the higher retainer fee that Jack and I kind of agreed to, with the budget that I have for ’25, we wanted to kind of put a limit on it.”
Birch said he’s been doing municipal work probably for most of his career.
“This particular contract, I spoke with some of my colleagues as to how they were handling things. I think I’m pretty comfortable that this is similar to - every contract with a municipality is different, depending what their needs are,” Birch said.
Some want to do everything completely hourly, others want a retainer fee and only do hourly on certain projects. Birch said he was flexible as long as everyone understands what they’re doing.
“I’m fine with - and I do have clients that go both ways - I’m fine with doing meetings under the retainer and the various communications. Fairly simple things, routine things would fall under the retainer,” he said.
Larger contract reviews and projects would fall under the hourly cost, if there are any. The hourly rate is a discounted rate from what normal rates are, he said.
Birch said he talked to city attorney Scott Reust about it, as did Chief Shilling. Reust reviewed the contract and had no issues with it.
Wayne Township Trustee Jeanie Stackhouse made the motion to approve the contract, with board member Gordon Nash providing the second. The motion passed unanimously.
Chief Shilling also provided the board with the monthly fire activity report for December.
The territory had 298 responses, and of those 85 incidents (28.5%) were overlapping. They responded to a total of nine fires, including building, cooking, fuel burner and vegetation fires.
Board member David Allbritten said it was good to see overlapping calls were below 30%. “It’s the first time in a long time,” he said.
Under mutual aid, Chief Shilling said they had mutual aid from Winona Lake on some of the fire territory’s fires. Some of the fires WWFT responded to were outside of the territory, including assisting Claypool at Louis Dreyfus, assisting Pierceton on a house fire and Winona Lake on a house fire. Leesburg also was requested by WWFT for aid in December.
During the month, they had 202 rescue/EMS calls; 13 hazardous conditions with no fire; 10 service calls; 19 good intent calls; 18 false alarms/calls; and 30 special incidents, including 29 CARES calls.
By station for December, station 17 (downtown Warsaw) had 114 calls; station 13 (Center Street) had 122 calls; and station 15 (CR 200S) had 33 calls.
A total of 258.75 hours of training were completed in December, Chief Shilling said, including a lot of EMT skills. Firefighters dedicated 6.91 hours to community service through various activities.
CARES Navigator Tanya Jackson, one of two full-time CARES employees along with Coordinator Mikaela Bixler, reported on CARES’ numbers for 2024.
She said they had 763 calls, of which 458 were new consumers, or people they met for the first time.
They had two full classes go through the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training, which is for first responders on how to handle mental health calls. They’re getting ready for the third class in May.
“It’s been well-received and we’re seeing a really big difference on calls with CIT-trained officers. It’s been very helpful,” Jackson stated.
She noted that she and Bixler are also QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer) trained, which is “basically CPR for suicide prevention. We do offer and train city employees, people we collaborate with, so they are also QPR trained.”
Jackson became a CIT coordinator this year to help Bixler as CIT is a “very big program,” she said.
Bixler also became a car seat technician so she can help people properly install car seats.
In other business, the board:
• Approved CARES accepting the $2,472 grant from the K21 Health Foundation to purchase 1,000 training books from The QPR Institute. The Warsaw Board of Public Works and Safety previously approved the grant acceptance.
• Approved the acceptance of a $57,428 grant from the K21 Health Foundation for the purchase of the Deep Trekker PIVOT Underwater ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle), as requested by Capt. Drew Shilling. The Board of Works approved the grant acceptance in January.
Capt. Shilling, who is the assistant dive commander for the Warsaw Dive Team, reported in November they applied for the grant. He explained the ROV is “basically a drone to help us with searches and rescues and recoveries.”
The grant will cover 100% of the ROV, as well as two days of training for 10 people.
• Approved for the Warsaw Dive Team to host three classes with Dive Rescue International July 28 through Aug. 3, as requested by Capt. Shilling.
The series of classes includes Critical Skills Diver, Evidence Recovery and Light Salvage and Recovery.
He said they’ve hosted the Dive Rescue International classes before. There’s no cost to the fire territory other than the normal registration fee for divers to attend classes.
“It’s a good program. It brings people from out of state to attend these classes, as well,” Capt. Shilling said.
The Board of Works approved the request at their last meeting.
Chief Shilling gave Capt. Shilling thanks for putting in the work on behalf of the city dive team as it takes a lot of logistics.
“It does bring a lot of people into our area, so we’re grateful for that,” Chief Shilling said. Not only that, but it saves the fire territory money by divers not having to travel for needed training.
The fire territory hosted prior classes by Dive Rescue International in Warsaw in 2013, 2021, 2022 and 2024.
“With this though, we will ask Center Lake boat ramp be closed. We worked it out with the parks department,” Chief Shilling said.
Capt. Shilling said they held the Light Salvage and Recovery class before and hosted it at the boat ramp then, too. It will be posted again this summer, a month in advance, that for a few hours on the day of training the boat ramp will be used for that class.
• Approved 23 travel requests for various employees throughout 2025.
• Announced the next meeting is at 4 p.m. March 4 in the city council chambers at City Hall.