The Connecticut Valley Hospital fire department would be eliminated under the budget-balancing plan released by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy Friday. The announcement comes about two months after The Courant reported about the duplication of fire and emergency services between the mental hospital's fire department and Middletown's South Fire District department.
The Malloy plan contains an item headed "Elimination of Connecticut Valley Hospital Fire Department," which says the three full-time CVH fire department positions will be cut. The savings derived from those cuts are listed at $180,802 for the rest of this fiscal year - that is, through June 30, 2012. The savings for the following full fiscal year of 2012-13 would be $247,096, the plan said.
The document included a note of explanation: "The South Fire District currently responds to all fire alarms and medical calls on the CVH campus."
That's what The Courant reported on May 8 in a Government Watch column. The column said that the hospital's largely volunteer fire brigade has been led by three full-time employees who were paid $346,077 in the previous year - $134,441 for Chief David Quinn, $131,268 for Assistant Chief Martin Leachman, and $80,368 for firefighter Joe Fragoso. The pay figures included a total of more than $100,000 worth of overtime paid to the three.
The column also reported that the CVH department responded to 72 alarms in 2009 and 62 alarms in 2010 -- "primarily false alarms" such as "patients pulling alarm, staff cooking, popcorn, smell of smoke," officials said.
Meanwhile, the column said, Middletown's South Fire District department, with 33 paid firefighters, responds to all of those same alarms at CVH. Also, over the past five years, the South District has answered about 1,000 medical emergency calls on the psychiatric hospital campus that the CVH brigade doesn't handle for itself.