WAUCHULA — Pole barns will be a hot issue when Hardee County develops a new fire assessment rate schedule, county commissioners believe.

Currently, the county-wide fire department receives fire assessment funds from only two categories – residential and non-residential (commercial).

A new fire assessment study will not yield more income for the county, but it will help to more fairly divide the assessment by adding more categories and additional payment tiers, said County Manager Lex Albritton Jr. It will give relief to small businesses and pass the cost equitably to the larger businesses.

The county has hundreds of pole barns that are not currently assessed for fire protection.

Pole barns, steel buildings and vacant lots are going to be huge issues, Albritton said.

“Pole barns burn and what’s a pole barn?” he asked. “If you choose to build something out of a pole, but it is not on an ag operation, is it a pole barn or is it just a commercial establishment?

“There are all kinds of intricacies that are going to cause people to get very upset and activities they are going to go through to minimize their assessment.”

The consultants conducting the study will help define the different structures and categories that will be considered for assessment, Albritton said.

The previous fire assessment study was conducted about five to six years ago and determined that the largest fire the department could effectively handle was 10,000 square feet, he said.

“So you are limited to assessing only what you can put out,” Albritton said. With only three assessment tiers in the commercial category, currently, a big box store pays the same as a 10,000 square foot warehouse.

“We have more firemen now and greater manning at the different stations and a little more apparatus and we’ve got a little more tankage,” he said.

Vacant land is another potential fire-assessment hot button issue.

“We don’t assess vacant land, but we spend hundreds of thousands fighting brush fires on vacant land and no one pays; general revenue has to absorb that,” Albritton said.

But when land is assessed, it is by the parcel, so five 10-acre parcels (50 acres total) would pay five assessments, but one 50-acre parcel would pay one assessment.

So land owners will go to the property appraiser and try to consolidate their parcels into one that is well above the upper limit, he said. You can’t keep passing that cost on, because when the general revenue dollars pay for it, everybody pays for it.

“As you learned in the impact fee study, things change, environments change and it’s pretty sound business practice to go ahead every three or so years and update all of the studies that you assess dollars to,” Planning and Development Director Nicholas Staszko said to the county commission recently.

The commission approved a $49,424 contract with Government Services Group, Inc. to conduct the fire assessment study.
Hardee County received confirmation of an $8,000 grant to off-set a portion of the study’s cost.

The study should be complete in May after which the county commission will review it for updating the fire assessment rates for the 2007-08 fiscal year budget.