By Julia Park
The Peninsula Gateway
LAKEBAY, Wash. — Key Peninsula Fire Commissioner Randy Takehara sometimes has trouble falling asleep these days.
The retired Air Force reservist has been in the fire service for three decades. Now, he serves as the board chair for his local fire district. His term is from 2022-2027.
The polite but direct commissioner doesn’t mince words when he talks about his frustrations with the community he was elected to serve. He said the commissioners all desire to help the community. But the distrust they’ve faced in recent months has been trying, he said, including at several town halls they’ve held to increase their transparency with the community and field questions.
“I do lose sleep over that distrust,” Takehara told The News Tribune on Oct. 15 . “I get terrible anxiety coming into these meetings.”
He said some residents are asking the same questions and interrupting the commissioners as they try to respond, then say the commissioners won’t answer their questions.
At the heart of the conflict is a $2.1 million property purchase the fire department made three years ago in Key Center, just down the road from their current headquarters at Station 46. The three parcels have benign, neighborhood names: the “Calahan” property, on the corner of Key Peninsula Highway Northwest and 92nd Street Northwest, and the “Olson” property composed of two parcels behind it. The fire department had big plans for that land, including building a new headquarters, training facility and health clinic, The News Tribune reported.
Instead, the real estate decision turned some residents against the fire department, saying the commissioners weren’t transparent enough with the community and misused public money, though the properties were bought with a low-interest loan.
The heated discussions between the department and residents at board meetings and town halls in recent months are happening as the department tries to pass a Maintenance & Operations (M&O) levy this November, which voters have approved every four years since 2012. The levy failed in the August primary with 57.79% “Yes” votes. It needs a supermajority of 60% to pass. The department is putting the measure before voters again on the Nov. 5 . ballot.
The levy is $0.17 per $1,000 of a home’s assessed value and would bring in about $800,000 for the fire department, the same amount as in previous years despite rising costs due to inflation. It would cost an owner of a $500,000 home $85 each year, or $7.08 each month, according to a chart released by the department.
The Key Peninsula Fire Department, officially Pierce County Fire Protection District No. 16, provides fire, rescue and medical services across the 65 square-mile peninsula, which has a population of about 20,000 people, according to its website and spokesperson Anne Nesbit.
The News Tribune attended a few of the agency’s meetings and talked to members of the fire department for an update on where the discussions stand, following opposition to the levy leading up to the August primary election.
Tensions remained high at recent town hall
The Key Peninsula Fire Department hosted a town hall on Oct. 10 at the Key Peninsula Civic Center for residents to ask the commissioners and fire chief questions about the properties and the upcoming M&O levy vote. It was the third town hall the department has hosted since September.
One resident stood up and said she was deeply concerned that the levy might not pass because she has a chronic illness. If the fire department’s response times increase, she would be at risk.
“I can die because of this,” she said, turning and speaking to the other residents.
Another resident, Alyssa Johnstone, raised concern about a community survey the board released last month to gather resident input on what to do with the properties. She said questions four and five, which asked respondents to vote “yes” or “no” on whether the board should sell the Calahan property as soon as possible, regardless of potential loss, or wait until an opportune time, didn’t leave enough room for a nuanced answer.
Johnstone said she is still interested in leasing the Calahan property to open a daycare there, which she told The News Tribune is a major need on the Key Peninsula. The News Tribune reported Johnstone first began expressing interest in January.
Several other residents raised their voices or protested against the three-minute limit for each public commenter to speak. Others interrupted the commissioners when they began responding to a question.
Before the previous town hall meeting, some in the department began to feel unsafe after someone reportedly advised them to wear flak jackets to the meeting, leading spokesperson Nesbit to issue a public announcement on the department’s Facebook account.
“While we fully acknowledge the emotional response felt towards land acquisition in Key Center . . . please be aware that making statements that make people feel unsafe about attending our event are never cool, funny or going to help voices be heard and questions get answered,” she wrote. “Please let’s be mindful.”
When will the department make a decision on the Key Center properties?
None of the commissioners told The News Tribune in recent weeks that they were ready to make a decision on whether or when to sell any of the three parcels.
Takehara said making a decision, for him, depends on the real estate market. Right now, the market has taken a downturn and he’s not interested in putting up the property for sale, although he’s listening for what the public wants the commissioners to do. He said they’ll probably make a move within the next five years, but possibly sooner if the market improves before then.
Commissioner Cambria Queen said she believes getting a comparative market analysis of the properties is the first step toward making a decision. Once they know what they can sell the properties for, they can move forward, but the timing depends on finding a broker willing to do an analysis. She said she tried reaching out to one already, but that person refused to “touch” the property because of the possibility they wouldn’t be the listing agent when it was sold. The location and condition of the properties make them “unique” and she thinks finding a broker “may take longer than I personally would like it to take.”
Commissioner John Pat Kelly also said he would like to know what the properties are worth on the market in order to make a decision. He would support either putting it on the market or hiring an appraiser to determine the value. He hadn’t proposed that to the rest of the board yet when he spoke to The News Tribune via phone on Sept. 20 .
Commissioner Stan Moffett told The News Tribune via phone on Oct. 15 that he doesn’t know when the board will make a final decision on the properties, but he doesn’t think it will be very soon. The commissioners generally agree that the Calahan property isn’t necessary and that it will be sold at some point in the future, but they don’t know when yet.
The board is working on reviewing responses to the community survey and plans to release a second survey to try to increase participation. The first survey got just under 400 responses, which is only about 3 percent of the total registered voters on the peninsula, he said.
They also plan to include more specific questions in the second survey because of ambiguities left by answers in the first one, according to Moffett. For example, the majority of respondents said “yes” to the question of whether the department should build a new headquarters in Key Center and “yes” to the question of whether they should sell the properties in Key Center, which are contradictory outcomes.
Commissioner Shawn Jensen said that he doesn’t think it’s the right time to put the Olson property on the market. If they sell it at a loss, they’ll still have to pay back the loan they took out to purchase the property in full. People say they’ve wasted money on these properties, but it’s not wasted money until they sell it at a loss, he said.
He said he feels it would be irresponsible not to plan for the replacement of the current headquarters in Key Center. The building is 51 years old and is the only one with administrative offices inside. The department also needs a new training area that’s more secure than the parking lot behind their headquarters, which isn’t fenced in. Someone broke into fire department vehicles and stole $30,000 in gear earlier this year because it isn’t secure, he said.
Key Peninsula Fire Chief Nick Swinhart told the News Tribune on Oct. 14 the gear was never recovered, and they were reimbursed with insurance.
If they can hold onto the Olson properties for another year or two and get close to what they paid for them, that would be OK, Jensen said. He wants to hear from the community in the second survey to get a concrete number of how much of a loss they’d be willing to take if the properties were sold. As for the Calahan property, he thinks they would likely make a decision on that within a year.
As the department creates a plan for the properties, they will continue working on their capital facilities plan, which is posted to their website.
What could happen if the levy fails?
Chief Swinhart told The News Tribune in July, ahead of the August primary election, that the $800,000 levy pays for staffing, maintenance of existing facilities and the purchase and maintenance of equipment. He said that if the levy failed, the department could be forced to cut five to six firefighters and possibly close one of their three staffed stations.
Key Peninsula firefighter Doug Gelsleichter, president of the department firefighters’ union, told The News Tribune on Aug. 13 that when he first joined the department, they had one ambulance guaranteed and were only staffing two stations. If the department closed its third staffed station and had to lose one of its two ambulances, that “would really be stepping back 10 years in staffing.” In that same time frame, their call volume has increased significantly, Gelsleichter said.
Asked for more specifics in a second interview on Oct. 14, Swinhart said the actual number of firefighters that could be cut is highly dependent on their union, which has said they would be willing to discuss changes to their current contract. The department also might be able to find grants and transfer money from other areas of the budget to mitigate the loss or make adjustments such as lowering minimum daily staffing.
Still, these adjustments won’t cover all $800,000, Swinhart said. Long-term, he doesn’t see how the department could avoid losing at least some staff. They have enough in reserves to ride out the impacts of a failed levy through at least 2025, so there wouldn’t be immediate layoffs. But if by the end of 2025, they still don’t have the money they need, they will need to make some difficult decisions, he said.
The station that has the least call volume would be the first one considered for closure, as is typical in most fire departments, according to Swinhart. For Key Peninsula Fire, that would be their Longbranch station, Station 49.
According to a chart on the Key Peninsula Fire website, the Longbranch station received close to 390 calls in 2022. The station with the next-highest number of calls was the Wright-Bliss station, Station 45, at close to 450.
Regardless of the station, closing one would increase response times to certain calls throughout the fire district, Swinhart said.
He gave an example: The department currently has a paramedic crew 24 hours a day at their Longbranch station. If that station was no longer open, the response time for a resident in Longbranch with a medical emergency could jump from 5 minutes to 20 or 25 minutes, since the next paramedic crew would have to come from the Wauna station up north.
The average response time for the department is within 10 minutes, Swinhart said. Staying within that is their goal.
Key Peninsula Fire spokesperson Anne Nesbit added that the department has two staffed medical units, and if one is on a call, the other has to fill in.
“If we close down a station, there’s always going to be someone coming from further, and if that medic unit is out, well, then it’s not just a little bit further, it’s a lot further,” she said.
Swinhart said that might require calling a medic unit from as far as Gig Harbor, or South Kitsap or Mason County.
There are other programs that could be affected by a failed levy. Swinhart said one of the high-level programs the department wants to work on is their volunteer program. It’s one idea the department is considering for their next strategic plan, which will set the department’s priorities for the next three to five years. That plan has been on hold until the M&O levy vote is final since whether or not they receive that revenue will change what they can afford to focus on, he said.
“The initial training and the outfitting (for volunteers) can be very expensive, and that’s just for any firefighter we bring on, right,” Swinhart said. “But a volunteers’ training program necessarily tends to be longer because it has to be spread out over a longer period of time.”
Although a paid firefighter can be trained in three months with an eight-hour-a-day, four-day-a-week schedule, volunteers are trained a couple of hours in the evening every week and take a lot longer to get up to speed, he said.
The department has aging engines that also need replacing. Their oldest engine on Herron Island is a 1986 engine, and they have others that are over 30 years old. If they’re not replaced soon, that could be a community safety issue, Nesbit said. The department does have a new engine coming in November or December that will help, but a “house fire takes more than one engine to show up,” she said.
Asked if the department would consider putting out the levy for a vote in a special election if it doesn’t pass this November, Swinhart told The News Tribune via email he doesn’t know yet. The commissioners would have to decide next year whether to run it in a special election, which would be very expensive, or wait for another general election, he wrote.
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