The Tupper Lake Village Board is seen at its Dec. 15 meeting. The board voted to create a fire truck reserve fund separate from the general fund, where these expenditures had previously been drawn from. From left are Trustee and Deputy Mayor Eric Shaheen, Trustee Brasen LaVassaur, Mayor Mary Fontana, Trustee Richard “Rick” Pickering and Trustee David Plummer. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

TUPPER LAKE — The village board voted unanimously at its Dec. 15 meeting to adopt a resolution creating a restricted fund dedicated solely to future fire truck purchases. The capital reserve fund would receive 10% of the overall annual payment the town of Tupper Lake makes to the village for fire protection. The village oversees the Tupper Lake Volunteer Fire Department. This 10% would be equally matched with a village contribution to the reserve fund.

Any expenditures from the truck reserve fund could only be made with the village board’s authorization.

The move capped off a months-long effort by village Mayor Mary Fontana to establish the fund after it came to light in August that there was not as much money set aside for purchasing a new fire truck as village officials had thought.

This forced the board to suspend a search for a new fire truck several months after it had previously given TLVFD its blessing to research and compare possible purchase proposals. The fire department’s truck search committee had, at the time, whittled its search to three pumper trucks.

These were meant to replace TLVFD’s Unit 165, a 1995 truck that the village had purchased used from the Peru Volunteer Fire Department for $30,000 in 2015. The truck remains in service, but is starting to show signs of deterioration, and TLVFD wanted to be proactive about its replacement, given the multi-year fire truck building timelines that many manufacturers are reporting.

In August, the village thought it had $330,000 set aside to make a downpayment on a new truck. The one the village board appeared to favor was quoted at $889,287, and the rest would have been bonded for. In reality, though, the village only had $193,000 set aside, which Fontana said would have led to too much debt to responsibly move forward with the purchase at the time.

That financial shortfall was not the result of any stolen or missing money. What had happened was that no dedicated truck replacement fund had ever been created since the town and village entered into a joint fire protection agreement in 2016. The money had, instead, always sat in the general fund.

The agreement did not stipulate, in writing, that a restricted truck reserve fund had to be created, though both governments had operated under an understanding that some money would be set aside specifically for a truck replacement.

As a result, when calculating how much was “set aside” for a truck, village officials had looked back over the years and arrived at the $330,000 figure by calculating how much was to be set aside for trucks without realizing that this had been reduced to $193,000 by several expenditures, all of which were legitimate, given the general fund’s structure.

These included $100,000 for a down payment on TLVFD’s Unit 163 pumper truck in 2017, $45,000 for purchasing a used fire truck for TLVFD’s Santa Clara substation in 2019 from the Keene Volunteer Fire Department and $32,000 or a Jaw’s of Life unit in 2021.

While those withdrawals add up to $177,000, the deduction from the theoretical $330,000 isn’t quite that much, as a portion of Unit 163 was paid for from the sale of the old fire station on High Street, and the Town of Santa Clara has been paying $5,000 back per year for the substation truck. They will continue to do so until the full $45,000 has been repaid.

Fontana said at the time, it was upsetting to have TLVFD members invest so much of their time researching a new truck, only to realize months later that there was not enough money for a purchase.

“This board did not make the decisions that led us here, but we are fully committed to correcting course,” she wrote in a statement. “Our focus is on doing what’s right for our fire department, for our residents and for the long-term financial health of the village of Tupper Lake.”

That letter is available in its entirety at tinyurl.com/mvz63dvs.

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Going forward

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It remains unclear when and what the replacement to Unit 165 will be. The first step of that course correction, Fontana said, was formally creating the restricted fund. Now that it’s established — the board’s Dec. 15 resolution took effect immediately upon approval — the next step is transferring the money over from the general fund.

Fontana said at the Dec. 15 board meeting that should be $213,000, a sum of the $193,000 from the summer and a subsequent $20,000 annual contribution. Before this transfer occurs, however, the mayor said she wanted to give TLVFD an opportunity to deduct any money from that to be put toward current repairs, since it’s still in the general fund. Fontana gave the department until Jan. 1 to make that request.

“I want a document, in writing, from the fire department with the exact amount of money they want me to spend on the truck repair, and the exact amount of money they want us to put in a restricted fund,” she said. “That way, in five years, they’re not going to ask, ‘Why this much money was moved into the account?'”

Fontana estimated at the Dec. 15 meeting that there was about $40,000 worth of repairs needed to three trucks, Unit 163, Unit 165 and the Santa Clara substation truck.

“They have a lot of repairs that they need, and only so much money in the budget that we approved for repairs,” she said.