Mike Chevalier, Chief of Little Hocking Volunteer Fire Department stands in front of one of the engines within the fire station in Little Hocking. (Photo by Amber Sandford)

LITTLE HOCKING — House Bill 509, also known as the Occupational Licensing and Regulation Bill, has Washington County volunteer fire chiefs worried about the future.

House Bill 509 was signed by Gov. Mike DeWine on Jan. 5, and will become effective on April 6. This legislation revises regulations pertaining to many professional licenses and certifications. It states that volunteer firefighters and EMS personnel will now have to go off-site for training and certification.

“It’s not only expensive, most volunteers work during the day,” said Washington County Commissioner James Booth. “We may lose EMS workers”.

According to Mike Chevalier of the Little Hocking Fire department, it could cost upwards of $12,000-15,000 dollars to get his staff trained and certified.

“Right now we can get training at little to no cost because we have continuing education instructors in the department,” Chevalier said. “For them to be trained and certified… right now for EMT training it’s right around $1,700 per person, and for fire training is around $1,000 per person. Then we would have to pay for the courses for the continuing education. If we have to send them off-site or hire groups to come in and train, it’s going to be cost prohibitive.”

For the time being, ongoing EMS education may still be offered through education sites that currently possess a certificate approval. When the bill takes effect in April, all volunteer EMS will have to travel to either Zanesville or Columbus for their continuing education. It must now be done with an accredited institution.

Most volunteer fire stations are dealing with the rising costs of continuing education according to the Fire Chief Brian Pracht of the Oak Grove Volunteer Fire Department.

“We are already dealing with Mid-East (Career and Technology Centers) raising their prices every bit of $200-300 a class. They are taking away accrediting facilities for recruitment, for training that we have established down here — and they are taking that away from us. Now with this bill we will have to go to state-owned and -ran places like career centers in Zanesville or Columbus,” Pracht said.

Pracht said since most volunteer EMS workers have day jobs, they now have to deal with trying to get time off work to travel to these training classes, and departments are trying to find a way to pay for the travel and classes.

“We had a first group of people going up for a 36-hour course and on the way there they got a text asking, ‘Where are you?’ They said they were in McConellsville, and they said ‘Well you should have been here by now.’ And we had a time of later by an hour. To send five people, it cost over $4,000,” said Pracht.

Pracht went on to say the back half of the bill was helping them by reducing the CE requirements, meaning the hours that they have to have in three year intervals to re-certify their cards. This is why the state representatives voted it in.

“They turned around and added all this other stuff in it afterwards. This is going to increase our costs and not only affect, us but this is also affecting the professionals,” said Pracht.

The chief at the Warren Volunteer Fire Department, Mark Wile, echoes what the other two chiefs have said about rising costs and sending EMS personnel to an off-site training class.

“Usually it takes a 30-hour class to renew your EMS, and $25 an hour is what Mid-East charges — that’s about $750. Or you can do 40 hours of continuing education, again at $25 an hour — that’s a thousand dollars. So each person is somewhere between $750 and $1,000 to re-certify every three years,” said Wile.

All three fire chiefs have said that if this bill is not amended the fire stations and the community they serve could lose EMS personnel.

Amber Sandford can be reached at asandford @newsandsentinel.com