As municipal department heads, my colleagues and I get frequent calls from the public. Most of the time the call is to praise a rescue crew that provided compassionate care, a police officer who assisted a citizen in trouble, or a public works employee who went above and beyond the call of duty. However, often calls are to ask questions like ‘Why did you send a big fire truck to my house when I called the rescue for chest pains?’ or ‘How come it takes so long for the plow truck to go by my house during a storm?’

It occurred to me that there are a lot of services your municipal government provides that aren’t very well known or understood by our citizens. In some cases the public has misconceptions about our departments.  

For instance, one of the most common misunderstandings about the fire department is that we are a fully staffed career department with personnel on duty at all stations around the clock. In reality that isn’t true. Our department is still predominately staffed by call members who respond to emergencies from their homes and work, with a skeleton crew of per-diem staff in the stations a few hours during the day to augment call members.  

As I pondered some topics that fall into the category of information the public should know about their fire department, I quickly realized there are a lot of things we could do a better job of publicizing. Then the question became, how do we get that word out? I thought of a weekly feature article that would be delivered free of charge to every household in the community and quickly realized I needed to speak with the Scarborough Leader.  I also recognized that the public would probably get bored with a weekly article about the fire department, but also that my peers in the police and public works departments must be experiencing a similar need to disseminate information.  

I called my good friends Police Chief Robbie Moulton and Public Works Director Mike Shaw and we came up with the idea of a rotating schedule of articles featuring information about each of our departments.  We approached the editors of the Leader and they were very receptive. Perhaps once we get this off the ground and see how it is received, we may expand it to other municipal departments such as Community Services or the public library.

So stay tuned for future articles and let any of us know what you think about them.  Drop us an email if there are any burning questions that you would like us to address in the future. Your municipal departments are here to serve you, and our goal is provide the public with information so everyone understands not only what we do and what we offer for services, but also why we do things the way we do.

Chief  Thurlow can be reached at  mthurl@ci.scarborough.me.us