JACKSONVILLE, ILLINOIS \u2014 The firefighter shortage has come to an end for the city of Jacksonville as officials said they are now fully staffed.<\/p>\n
Jacksonville Fire Chief, Matt Summers, told me they have hired four new firefighters in the last six months.<\/p>\n
Summers said this is the first time in many years where the station has received an influx of applications.<\/p>\n
In past years, they\u2019ve received between six to 12, but this year they received nearly 70 qualified applicants.<\/p>\n
Summers said this was a city-wide effort to combat the shortage, with feedback from current firefighters and the mayor.<\/p>\n
\u201cA brand-new union contract with the city, increased pay, starting pay,\u201d Summers said. \u201cPay wages went up quite a bit, we increased our residency radius which was just a few miles. [It was] really the county into an actual circle of 30-mile radius, so that does reach over into Springfield, over to Pike County, Scott, Green.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fire chief said being fully staffed has lowered the burden for other firefighters who had to complete loads of overtime. Those firefighters are now able to rest and spend more time with their families.<\/p>\n
Summers said they also moved agility testing in-house, to lessen the burden of applicants traveling across the state.<\/p>\n
For the last four years, the fire department said they\u2019ve responded to more than 3,000 calls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, ILLINOIS \u2014 The firefighter shortage has come to an end for the city of Jacksonville as officials…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":237653,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5136],"tags":[5229,10181,20781,127410,3188,723,127411,7310,61008,127412,127413,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-237652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jacksonville","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-applications","10":"tag-fire-department","11":"tag-firefighter-shortage","12":"tag-fl","13":"tag-florida","14":"tag-fully-staffed","15":"tag-jacksonville","16":"tag-overtime","17":"tag-pay-wages","18":"tag-residency-radius","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115228178603424011","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}