Morgan City will stay in firefighters pact
Morgan City will not opt out of its joint mutual aid agreement pact with fire departments across St. Mary Parish and replace them with mutual aid agreements.
If the city ever intended to do so, Mayor Lee Dragna said, he would get City Council approval first and then come to the St. Mary Parish Fire Association to discuss the plan before making the move.
That was the conclusion reached after nearly an hour of discussion during the St. Mary Parish Fire Association meeting Thursday at the Emergency Operations Center in Morgan City.
Dragna, who in late January sent a vague letter to the fire departments and the parish seeking to invoke the 90-day opt out clause of the mutual aid pact with the intent to instead write individual mutual aid agreements with the departments, apologized multiple times for the way the issue went about. He said he only was trying to be proactive to a potential situation that came out of a conversation with parish leaders about Morgan City possibly helping Amelia.
He said if he would have to help the department financially, he could not do it under the current mutual aid agreement. Dragna said that helping Amelia with a financial pact is no longer mutual aid.
St. Mary Parish President David Hanagriff said helping the department out financially through a cooperative endeavor agreement and offering mutual aid through the pact are two different things.
“The mutual aid is completely opposite of that,” Hanagriff said. “It has nothing to do with that. Mutual aid is still mutual aid no matter what.”
Dragna said he should have explained the situation better in the letter, which simply expressed a desire to opt out and was left vague intentionally, he said at the city council meeting earlier this month, because he intended to discuss the issues individually with departments. He finally divulged his intent after issues of finances within the department came up at the council meeting.
Dragna said numerous times in Thursday’s meeting that he would never leave another department in a bind fighting a fire, sending whatever resources Morgan City had available to assist anyone who called.
“There was no ill intent meant to hurt any department,” he said of the initial letter, which he said was rescinded days after the Feb. 2 council meeting.
Dragna said the mutual aid pact doesn’t list the departments as members of a fire association. He said it simply references them as departments, so he was unaware there was an association.
Early in the meeting, Dragna said he still wanted to have individual agreements with the fire agencies. However, he said more research would be done, and he would come before the association before making that move.
He said if Morgan City had to man a fire department in Amelia, then he couldn’t do it under the current mutual aid agreement.
Morgan City Fire Chief Alvin Cockerham said Dragna was not the first mayor to ask him about looking into the situation with helping Amelia.
However, Cockerham said he doesn’t want to take over another department, and even if he wanted to, he couldn’t handle it with the duties he has for his department.
Hanagriff, who had discussed the issue privately with Dragna and two others before Morgan City invoked the clause to opt out of the agreement, said he never asked anyone to take over Amelia’s department, where he said there are some budget issues that have arisen in recent months that are being worked through.
Cockerham noted it is a nationwide problem to find people to fight fires now, whether it be for a volunteer department or a paid one like his.
That’s why Cockerham said the departments need to band together. He said they have to find solutions to assist those who are grappling with budgets.
“Everybody’s hurting for money,” Cockerham said. “Everybody’s hurting for personnel. Who couldn’t use some more personnel? I sure could.”
Morgan City Councilman Lou Tamporello asked if either Berwick or Amelia is in danger of closing their doors in the near future or need help, to which they responded no. No one else had that issue in the parish, either, Hanagriff said.
While Dragna received pushback for his initial plan to work individual cooperative endeavor agreements, towards the end of the meeting, at the urging of Parish Councilman Rodney Olander, Dragna said first he would keep the mutual aid agreement in place but come back to the association if any changes need to be made.
Dragna finally said he would seek council approval first and then come to the association to make any changes.