By Liz McMahan
About 98 percent of the 3,839 alarm calls answered by the Muskogee Police Department turn out to be false alarms, Chief of Police Rex Eskridge said Tuesday.
That is the equivalent of taking one officer off the street full time, Eskridge said.
Firefighters responded to 415 false alarms last year. Of those, 117 were from Fair Haven Apartments, 500 Dayton St. The total false alarms for Fair Haven were more than 25 percent of the bogus calls the fire department received for the year, said Derek Tatum, fire chief.
False alarms cost each department thousands of dollars and hundreds of man-hours each year and jeopardize the citizens by having officers and firefighters tied up on a false alarm when they might need to be somewhere else for a real calls, Tatum said.
Councilor Jim Ritchey said the emergency vehicles responding to false alarms also create a traffic hazard, as they run with lights and sirens on.
Muskogee is one of a few larger cities in the state that doesn’t have fines or fees for false alarms, Eskridge said.
He and Tatum asked the City Council’s Public Works Committee to enact an ordinance setting a $25 minimum fee for false alarms. The more times a false alarm was sounded, the higher the fee would go until it finally reached a maximum fine and fee of $449.
The committee approved the proposed ordinance and will vote on final approval Monday night at the City Council meeting.
The false alarm ordinance was one of several items on the agendas Tuesday afternoon for the Public Works, Finance and Charter Review Committees.
However, neither the portion of the Finance Committee pertaining to discussing next year’s budget nor any of the charter review process was held for lack of a quorum.
Jackie Luckey was absent from all of Tuesday’s meetings. Robert Perkins left shortly before 5 p.m. to go to work. Mayor John Tyler Hammons and Councilors David Ragsdale and James Gulley had to leave to attend a City of Muskogee Foundation meeting so that group would have a quorum.
The discussion of next year’s budget was moved to the City Council meeting scheduled for Monday night.
Reach Liz McMahan at 918-684-2926 orClick Here to Send Email
