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Midland County Commissioners come to annual agreement with volunteer fire departments

The annual contract grants up to $100,000 to volunteer fire departments.

MIDLAND, Texas — Midland County Commissioners came to a contract agreement with the Greenwood and Northeast Volunteer Fire Department on Monday at the County Commissioners meeting.

The negotiations were actually quite simple, as the parties have been making these agreements for a while.

“We’ve been doing this since - I believe with Northeast was the original one back in the eighties when it first started - so the counties been doing this for several years now, so nothing’s changed," Count Fire Marshall Justin Bunch said. "So it’s an easy contract and we’ve just got to get that every year.”

The contract is an annual one so it has to be re-upped each year, but there are normally little to no complications with the contract. 

These contracts help them get the funding they need to continue to function as proper fire departments.

“It’s just an annual contract that we do with the volunteers to provide funding for them because they’re a non-profit organization," Bunch said. "It’s the same contract we do every year to provide them with a hundred thousand dollars to each volunteer agency."

Volunteers at Greenwood and Northeast are called upon whenever they are needed. But unlike other fire departments, a lot of their equipment comes from their own pockets. 

Meanwhile, they also give their own time and effort when volunteering for the fire department.

"So in Midland County, the city provides fire and EMS protection through an interlocal agreement, so they are our main... our first response, any fire and EMS response is the city," Bunch said. "The volunteers, they are unpaid volunteers. They take it out of their own time, their own money, raise their own funds, provide their own trucks, stuff like that." 

With a hundred thousand dollars, there are certain things they can and can’t do, but they can spread the money out pretty far.

“None of our volunteers out here get paid, so every time they go out on a fire, they use their own gas, they use their own training, they don’t get paid for any of that, from the fire department or from us," Bunch said. "With that contract that the county has there is specific stuff that they can and can’t use that are funding for. They can use it for training, they can use it for insurance, they can use it for vehicle fuel for their fire trucks.”

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