Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam Foreign.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Welcome, everybody, to another edition of unbolted. I'm M.J. bolt, your host. Today I've got with us Jim Bennett, who is a. The incumbent and also the candidate that is running FOR FIRE District 9 Commissioner, position 1. Jim, thanks for being with us today.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: Yeah, you bet. So Jim is one of our Spokane County GOP recommended candidates for this position.
We go through a huge vetting process where we involve all our representative PCOs and they vet these candidates to make sure they are the best representatives, the best people for these positions to get that recommendation. So thank you for going through that process, Jim, and, you know, we really appreciate that because I think that helps, you know, make sure that the county Republican Party is. Is being a good steward and helping to inform people.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: It was a fun process to go through.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Well, good, good. Is that your first time going through it, I would imagine, right?
[00:01:40] Speaker A: It was my first time going through it. I was amazed it had not been in the past. But I think it's a good experience, it's a good exercise and some really fine people.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We started a new process two years ago, and so, you know, it is kind of new and different from what people have done in the past, but we feel like it's, you know, we try to treat every candidate the same so there's no favoritism, you know, not the good old boys club. It's gonna, you know, have the same vetting questions and everything. And then we put it back to the membership of the party, which are the pcos, for them to vote.
So we feel like it's a lot more fair process.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: Very good.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah. So, Jim, you know, appreciate you coming on here. And, you know, especially the fire district commissioners, a lot of people don't know about these positions or even like what district they're in. So first of all, tell us a little bit about where Fire District 9 is in Spokane County.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Well, Fire District 9 is stretched out across the northern tier of the county.
It starts on the edge of the city on Francis Boulevard or Francis Avenue, and moves northward into the Wandumer area as far as going up in the division corridor.
And it stretches as far west as out 7 mile, 9 mile area on the south edge of the river, of course, and then stretches as far over as the foothills of Mount Spokane until you butt up against the Newman Lake area.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: Wow. So big. Yeah. So is the. The southern border of. It is kind of Francis. And then like you said, it pretty much stretches along, along the.
The width of the county.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: It sounds like we used to have all of that area that bordered on Francis, but the city has made a few incursions over the last few years.
They took, of course, the tax base along division.
They took the Costco in.
Part of our revenue stream, of course, is that we get reparations from the city of about a half million a year for the old Costco.
And then, of course, then they encroached up further on the Division Y and took all that tax revenue that they could find up that way. And then it stops right there at Hastings. Or actually, is it Hastings just north.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: Of the Y there?
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, north of the Y.
And the city, of course, would like to get the new Costco, but I don't think they want to be any part of that.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. So your, you know, district boundaries sounds like they've changed, especially for District 9 over the years. And so I wanted to share with everybody because not everybody is aware of, you know, what jurisdiction they are in. I'm in a. In a little sliver sliver of District 8. Most of it's on the south hill, but there's a little part that's over here in the Valley that I happen to be in. And a lot of people don't even realize we're in District 8 and not, you know, whatever the Valley is. So let me share with everybody just real quick, because, you know, part of this is us learning more about, you know, just information, you know, what. Who our representatives are. So if you're not sure where. What district you are in, what fire district you are in, let me. Hopefully my computer will do this. Maybe. Maybe it sometimes kind of freaks out. So it might not do this, but you can go to spokanecounty.org and to the Scout, and you can enter your address. It doesn't look like it's showing up yet.
Oh, here it is. Let me. Because I got to add it to stage. I got to get that techno, technologically savvy brain going again.
So here's the. The Scout website again. It's spokanecounty.org Scout and you can get to this. And this is where you enter in your address and you can see. And I'm just gonna open mine. I've ran for office before, so most people know where I live. And this isn't any private information that most people can't find anyway, so I'll go ahead and put myself out there. But you can see, like, this tells me right here under the public safety, I'm in Fire District 8. So if you don't know which fire district you are. This is how you can pull that up and find out. And then you can also see, you know, what other districts you're in, like school district, utility districts, and your other legislative districts as well. So there's a little.
A little information and learning opportunity we have here, Jim.
So, Jim, you've. You've been doing this for a while, correct? You've been a fire commissioner for a few years?
[00:06:37] Speaker A: I have. If you look at my totality of time as a fire Commissioner, it's 18 years I've been with District 9.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: And. Yeah, you were telling me that you were with a different fire district before, Correct?
[00:06:53] Speaker A: Correct. Stevens County Fire District 1.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: Okay, so how long did you serve there, and how long have you been here in Spokane County?
[00:07:01] Speaker A: I did that for six years.
Then there's a little gap, and then I served here for 12.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Okay, so you've been on fire district nine as a fire commissioner for 12 years. So, you know, Jim, I think it's always interesting for people to learn about, like, what your history is, what your background is, and how you got to this place where you ran for this position, you ran for this office. And why are you choosing to run again?
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Well, there's still a lot of stuff to be done. That's one of the reasons I ran again.
But primarily, I've been in Fire and EMS for well over 50 years.
My paramedic registry number is 54.
And July 4th was actually my 50th anniversary as a paramedic.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: It's a fun job. I've enjoyed it.
I've worked for a number of different agencies across the country. I started off in Florida.
I've worked in Kansas and Albuquerque and Tucson, Oklahoma City, Spokane. I've been in spokane now for 33 years.
So I was actually born in Spokane, so it was always home. But every time I came home to visit and inquired about paramedic jobs. Oh, we don't need no paramedics. We don't need them.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Wow. But you finally made it back, huh?
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Did finally make it back, yeah.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Well, thank you for serving.
That's such an important role and such an important job, and my goodness, 50 years. That's quite a. That's quite a track record of service.
Yeah.
So, Jim, what's your vision for the Spokane County Fire District 9? What is your vision for this district?
[00:08:54] Speaker A: Well, we're just now spending a half million dollars on a. What we call a strategic plan.
And we're actually trying to decide where we are going. We want to know where our taxpayers want us to go.
We want to know how we can do our job better.
We do a lot of wildland. If you look at our district and how we're spread out, we are what they call an urban rural interface.
And we have a lot of rural areas and we have wildland fire. It happens to be one of our specialties. It's where a lot of our crews work hard and train hard and then we give back to the entire community. We fight fires all over. We're the only bulldozer among all the districts that are in Spokane county and even Stevens county for that matter.
But we get deployed on wildland project fires all over the region.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Oh, fascinating.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: And while that seems like. Well, that's distracting from your. Your central mission, it actually earns money back for the district. All of the salaries that we pay out are brought back. Our backfill time is backfilled by the state or the federal government, depending on which project fire we're working on.
And we actually wind up with revenue. I think this year we're close to $2 million in revenue. So we, we utilize that to buy new equipment, to buy new stuff.
As you know, under the old Initiative 695, we're limited by that 1% of growing our budget.
So that leads us to grow our district by organic growth, which is new building and new construction.
And that's just not enough to keep it going. Our insurance rates go up 40% in one year. Our L and I went from being like $15,000 to over $300,000 in a period of less than five years.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: And so, and then the state's always putting mandates on us. The things we have to do for them and we have to just pay for it out of our pocket.
And there's no revenue source for that except what we already have.
And so it's looking for creative ways to finance our district. It's looking for ways that we can perform our job better that this half million dollar project on getting a strategic plan is so important.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: So that we can focus the dollars that we're going to spend in the future where they're actually needed and provide the services that we need. So some of the things people don't realize about their fire district, we're like your first level of defense for global warming. I mean, you think about all the things that we put out and all the things that we respond to in terms of hazardous materials and so forth.
We are here to protect the environment, number one. Number two, of course we save and protect Your life. But number three, we're also here to be good storage of your money.
And your money, you're sitting there going, well, I'm paying taxes. Well, your fire district, when it's ran well, has a good rating bureau rating. And the rating bureau rating for Fire District 9 sits between a 3 and a 6. And a 6, of course is our rural areas and we're not going to get it any lower. But in our urban interface area where most of our residents live, we've got that down to a solid three.
And what that means is that when you go to state Farm and buy insurance, you're getting their absolute best rate and that saves you money. If we allowed the entire district to go to a 6 or even to a 10, nobody could afford their insurance for their home.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Wow.
Yeah, I did. I just learned about this last year. I didn't even know there was, you know, such a thing. And that that impacts your, your home insurance, your property insurance.
So pretty fascinating. And it sounds like too, the different fire districts, even within the county are very unique. So. Right.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Everybody has a slightly different risk picture. And when I say that, you know, some areas have a little bit of industrial area like valley fire, even city fire has a certain amount of industrial exposure.
So those present a whole different problem and a whole different way of fighting fire.
And of course then specialty training, specialty equipment and nothing's cheap.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And did you. I kind of caught it, but I want you to repeat it and help clarify. Did you say you're the only fire district that has a bulldozer?
[00:13:26] Speaker A: Is that we are.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Talk about that a little bit.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: So in wildland fire, some of the fastest way to put down a fire line, you can dig them by hand or you can bring a bulldozer in that has a plow on it and you can put that fire line down very fast.
Our fire dozer is got purified air filtration systems, it's closed cab air conditioned and it moves a little faster than your ordinary John Deere bulldozer.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: Farm, farmland or road dozer. Yeah.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Modified to be a little bit faster and it's modified to. Well, this one actually flies. I've been told we've had it on a couple fires where they were fighting at night and driving actually with the over there by up river and they were up there in the rocks up on those cliffs and literally flew the dozer through the air to get it.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: To where it needed to be. Wow. I bet that had to be a site. So that's probably so is that the reason why you get contracted out then, because you have this specialty equipment.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: We have that specialty equipment. We also have brush trucks that are special four wheel drives that can get in out in the wilderness.
We have. Crews are especially trained. We have incident management teams that are trained to run a full scale incident.
And those guys oftentimes go out independently and run large incidents for the state.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: We've even gone as far as south into California and we've been invited at least three times. I can remember, we've been invited to Canada to fight fire.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Yeah, unfortunately, it's all too prevalent of an issue these days is, you know, filing wildfires. And of course we see the smoke and, and so, yeah, you fighting that and helping to, you know, helping the crews to fight that, to help get that down as fast as possible. We all want clean air to breathe, that's for sure.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: We do.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Jim, why do you believe people should vote for you over your opponent in this race?
[00:15:46] Speaker A: Well, I don't have anything negative to say about my opponent. I looked over his resume and it's impressive. He's in school, become a lawyer. He graduates in December.
I, on the other hand, graduated with an MBA 20 years ago from Whitworth.
I've been serving as a fire commissioner for 18 years.
I can stretch a dollar. I know what we're spending our money on.
I've been involved with the fire service for 50 years and I've been a beginning firefighter to an officer. And I, I think that I can pretty much keep us on track.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Yeah, sounds like it. Do you have any endorsements that you want to share with people?
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Sure, I've been endorsed by the Republican party.
I've also been endorsed by the rank and file of members of Union 2916 of the AIFF.
So.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Is that a local firefighter union? Because I'm not familiar.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: That's the firefighter union for both District 8, District 9, and for District 10.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. Yeah, thanks for clarifying that. Okay. That's very important.
Jim, what are your top priorities for the fire district? And you've kind of talked about a few of them about the strategic plan, but what other priorities do you have?
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Well, one of the things I've been working on and I keep working on every time I'm board chairman, is what I call community readiness. I want us to be more capable because people are going to. You have a major event and. And I've worked on deployments for hurricanes and all across the southeast, first thing that happens is people come running to your Fire station wanting help.
Well, if your fire station doesn't have a generator, your fire station doesn't have the capability to be self sustaining in that same disaster, then you've kind of let down your citizenry.
And so that's one of my priorities. My second priority is to make sure that the fire station is a healthy environment for our firefighters.
And we try to push a program that we call healthy in and healthy out. And we try, you know, don't go trampling through the living areas with your dirty turnouts because all that stuff that's on your turnout is carcinogenic material.
So.
And cancer is.
Well, it's one of our biggest problems with queer firefighters.
So we want to try and get that those safe programs to keep the job safe as we can.
And I'm really pushing for that. So we're healthy in and healthy out.
Aside from that, my other big push is to come up with a strategic plan. In this next year. We're spending a half million dollars on it to not only expose the needs of the district, but to expose the risk that are in the community.
We had a fire here recently out on market and it was a warehouse for batteries, lithium batteries. And you know, to the casual observer, you're sitting there going, it had a fire, you put it out, big deal.
Well, turns out lithium is a huge carcinogen. It's covered every bit of our equipment, our SCBAs, our turnout gear, the axes, the shovels and everything else that was used for firefighting was covered with this lithium residue.
Everything had to be specialty cleaned.
It cost thousands of dollars. Fortunately, it was covered by the insurance of the insured for the house or the building, the warehouse.
But that just shows you that's our tip of the iceberg of the sort of things that we're up against.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, I bet we were talking about that earlier today too, about how, you know, these residues that your firefighters can get on, you know that if you, if you're not able to clean that off your equipment and your, you know, your clothing, your, your could take, even if you're not in that same, that same building where all of that stuff was continuing to breathe that in. And I'm sure the longer exposure to this stuff, this deadly toxic stuff is, you know, probably makes people sicker and increases these cancer rates.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: We did just get a grant from the Gary Sinisi foundation and it purchases an extractor machine that you can put two of those SCBAs and their harnesses and everything in their mask, put them inside the machine. It twirls Them around, sprays them down with solution, extracts it, sucks it all back out and deposits the entire residue into a little tiny tray about this big as a powder.
It's incredible. And it cost 40 grand. And the Gary Sinise foundation just donated that to us.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. That's so important. I mean, we got to take care of our firefighters, our fighter. We need to keep them healthy so they can keep, you know, stay in the line of work. Right. And help continue to protect us. So it's very, I can see that that's an important issue and to continue to advocate for. For sure.
Yeah. Jim, what, how, you know, once you're reelected after this election, how do you plan to continue to connect with the community, you know, and hear from the citizens? Is that something you guys are looking at with your strategic plan too?
[00:21:28] Speaker A: It is. And we, you know, nothing's perfect, but we do try. We have open houses that run from May through June to invite the community in. We have a demo day at our main training facility, Station 92.
It's usually the first weekend of June.
Kids are usually out of school. It's a big carnival, big fair. We have all kinds of different providers here. A vista comes scraps and different health providers.
Everybody showing, you know, what they do. We also bring in life. Flight flies in.
So we have a good demonstration day. We show people what a kitchen fire looks like. We have a mock up and why you don't want to just go spray water on your, your kitchen fire, on.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Your grease fire, on your grease fire.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: That blows up the wall.
So we show people techniques on how they can do. We even have demonstrations on cpr.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: So where can people find out when those events are?
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Well, we have a webpage. It's our Spokane County Fire district9.org webpage and it's under revisement right now. I can't promise you that it's up today.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:22:46] Speaker A: It was up a couple weeks ago. I know they were taking it down to revise it.
I'm hoping it's back up.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: So. But it's, it's hugely popular. We do, we have a person who does our social media, who's on Facebook, is on X, is on a couple other things. I can't even remember what they are.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Okay. And that's for the district page itself. Okay, that's great. Yeah. And I think just like those tidbits, you know, you bring up the kitchen fire actually had one just a couple, probably about two, three weeks ago.
And I was so excited to try some tallow to make some Homemade potato chips. And I, you know, dried the, dried the potatoes, you know, slivers really good. I set them out on the counter and stuff. And I don't know if I, I haven't tried this before, but I don't know if I put too many in at a time or what happened. And I have a gas stove, but it overflowed and I was like, oh my goodness. And I just, you know, quickly just turned my gas off and, and moved that was able, move, you know, almost, almost a fire, but not. It didn't quite get there. But you know, I thought about that because I haven't ever had a grease fire before. I'm like, yep, I know you don't want to throw fire or water on it, you know, but you kind of have to make those split, you know, second decisions when something happens like that. So these, you know, tips and, and you know, tips of the traders, you guys know what to do when something happens.
We need to hear about that and we need to inquire about that.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: And we have a very vigorous, what we call community education program. So we have.
It's probably 12 people that are fully dedicated to going forth and doing education.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Oh, that's great.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: And even on the wildland side of things, I'd like to put a little plug in for that as well.
We have a full time forester that's employed with us and he was the head of U.S. forestry Service and now he does all of. He's one of our battalion chiefs and he helps us instrument doing home planning and yard planning and making sure that your fire risk for your home and wildfire is low.
He can come by and do prescriptive work for us and tell us, you know, what you need to do.
And sometimes, and I don't know that we have it available right now, but sometimes we have grant money and it's available through the DNR to help pay for some of those things.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: That's nice and it's so important. We've. We were with the other candidate that's running for fire Commissioner in District 4. Earlier we were talking about Firestorm and I actually lived up north when that happened. And then out in the valley I've lived, I live in the very south valley in the Ponderosa area.
So when we first moved here in the early 2000s, the course we had that Dishman Hills fire, I don't remember what they called that, but it kind of came through the Dishman Hills area and the wind was really extreme and it moved very fast. So. And I grew up on the farm, you know, so I know that land management, how important that is, especially as you, you know, have the rural areas like you're saying you have in your district where you have that combination, but you have people that need to figure, learn, you know, and how to manage their property so that if something happens, they're much more likely to, to be able to weather it. Right. And we've had these awful. The Gray fire and the Oregon Road fire that were to, you know, so damaging. That just happened.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. That area is still growing back. That's still.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure. Yeah. With that. So Northwest Spokane all the way over to Airway Heights. I mean you've got all that rural area, lots of homes in there, lots of land. I'm sure that that rule of management is going to be very important, that education.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: There's some parts of our county that are what we call undistricted. They're kind of wild.
Early when I was first doing this job, I was told, oh well, there's no homes up there. Don't worry about it.
When you go up there now and start looking around up those hills, there are million dollar homes up there all over and they're outside of the fire district.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
Yeah. But you're responsible for what happens in the district. Right. And that can of course impact the neighbors.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: It is. I mean, we do have one resident that pretty close to that same area, they came down and said, well, what do we need to do the contract with the fire district? And so they have a contract.
There's a lot of homes up there that I'm pretty sure what happened for them was their insurance company said, what? You're not part of a fire district.
Well, here's your rate. Can you afford that? Oh, no, I can't afford that. Well then they come down, talk to us and we'll gladly provide a contract for them. What we really would like to see is them actually join the fire district so that, you know, we don't have to have that contract money being accounted for that place.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: How does that work? Do people, can people do that individually like individual lands? Or can they maybe get together and.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: A group of them competition for us to move our boundary line and we can do that.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Oh, interesting.
See, I'm learning so much. I had no idea. That's amazing. Right.
Jim, final comments. Anything else that you want to make sure that voters would know about you?
[00:28:25] Speaker A: I just want people to show up to the show up vote and make good choices.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Right, right, that's for sure. And that brings up a great point. You know, we got about 80, 80 some percent of our voters to vote last year in the presidential election.
And typically the trend is, is that people, you know, that that percentage goes way down for these local elections in this kind of off, you know, cycle election.
But these races are so important. We've got Jim here, you know, who's been a fire district, local fire district commissioner for 12 years. We have school board races and city council races. I mean, these are the things that impact us every single day right here in our backyards.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Literally the decisions that we make really do fit inside your wallet.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Right? Exactly.
So, yes, that, that property statement that comes out every.
Right.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: Every year I pay those same taxes.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: So exactly what's that?
[00:29:31] Speaker A: I'm very mindful of what we spend money on.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. And we appreciate that, Jim. So it is super critically important that people remember to vote. It is be informed voter. You know, when you get that ballot, don't just toss it in your pile because chances are you'll figure it about it. Most people do. But get it out, fill it out. And if you want to know about the other recommended candidates from the Spokane county party, they've done the homework for you, go to spokane gop.com and you can find out about the other endorsed candidates like Jim that are running for. For to be your representative.
Right. And that's what Jim is doing. And Jim, we so appreciate it.
Where can people find out more information or get in contact with you?
[00:30:14] Speaker A: Well, actually my, my email, of course, is jbennett spokanecounty fire district9.org okay. And they do that directly and go to our website and it has who runs the fire district. And you can click on either of the three commissioners, separately or individually, and we will respond.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Okay, awesome. So if you've got any questions, more questions for Jim, reach out to him if you. And you know, make sure to get out there and vote this, this November for these important elections. Jim, thank you so much for, you know, being a representative, for serving, for serving so long as a firefighter, as a, you know, emt. Correct. Paramedic. Yes. And. And just being on the front lines and helping citizens for so long. We really appreciate it and thanks for coming out today to help us get to know you and be an informed voter.
[00:31:12] Speaker A: It was fun. Thank you, mj.
[00:31:14] Speaker B: All right, take care. Blessings everybody.
Sa.
