By Dan Sokil
Ambler Gazette
NORTH WALES, Pa. — North Wales officials are starting a deep dive into what could be needed as a study suggesting fire services regionalization with Upper and Lower Gwynedd and Ambler moves forward.
“We’re just looking at how it applies to North Wales specifically,” said borough Mayor Neil McDevitt.
| WHAT FIREFIGHTERS WANT: Annual report spotlights training needs
The discussion comes in the wake of a joint study presented by state Department of Community and Economic Development officials in a public meeting on May 31 in partnership with the four towns and their fire companies. North Wales officials said in June they planned to take up talks with the other three towns and the fire companies in the following months. Upper Gwynedd said in early September they’d take up the topic during that town’s 2027 budget meetings in October.
Since the study was presented in May, McDevitt told council on Tuesday night, council’s public safety committee has met several times with leadership from the North Penn Volunteer Fire Company to discuss the study and its recommendations, discuss rough cost estimates, and delineate what that company would need to see if the process moves ahead.
“One of the key findings in this is: We need to make sure we have a voice in the process,” McDevitt said.
“It is expensive, there’s no question about that. But we’re not convinced, as the smallest community, that we would have a proportionate voice in the process. One of the biggest challenges is, when we’ve had previous regionalization discussions, we always kind of thought we weren’t being treated with respect,” he said.
North Wales would have the smallest population and tax base of the four towns being discussed, the mayor said, and the fire company has indicated they’d prefer to start with more operational cooperation first, rather than move quickly to a merger or legal integration.
“Working toward sharing the training, sharing their equipment, standardizing operations throughout the fire companies,” McDevitt said.
“We already have an existing structure of cooperation when a fire alarm is sounded. You will often see them coming into our community to help, and North Penn, their strength is as a ladder company — they’re often one of the first companies to go to other places,” he said.
Council currently contributes $40,000 to $45,000 in tax revenue to support the volunteer fire company in the town’s annual budget, and rough estimates to replace that level of service with paid firefighters run much higher: about $750,000 for two daytime staff to work 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays plus cover costs for apparatus, maintenance and equipment, and an estimated $1.08 million to increase that number to four full-time staff.
“Keep in mind: To fully staff a firetruck, you need to have at least four people on there: two people inside, two outside. That would be the $1.08 million. For comparison’s sake, that would be an increase of 15 to 23 times the current funding for the fire company, from our existing budget,” McDevitt said.
Also worth noting: the North Penn Volunteer Fire Company currently covers both North Wales and parts of Lower Gwynedd Township, and the fire company is “currently in a funding dispute with Lower Gwynedd Township, over a contractual issue. It’s not something North Wales is directly involved in, but it reinforces the need for the communities to trust each other,” the mayor said.
Another issue to be addressed is how each company would be dispatched to incidents. Currently, fire companies submit a list to county dispatchers of who is available to respond to calls, “and it’s not necessarily who’s closest,” while other companies in the county use a GPS-based system that dispatches the closest first.
“The fire company believes the current level of service — approximately 450 to 500 calls a year — is manageable. But if those numbers continue to go up, we will need to start taking more definitive action,” McDevitt said.
“Our recommendations for council are: we do not pursue formal legal consolidation at this point. North Penn Volunteer Fire Company will focus on operational cooperation,” he said.
Other recommendations from the fire company are that council not reach out to the three other municipalities for now, but let the fire companies take the lead in talks while working to “identify where they can consolidate and coordinate.” Funding from council to the fire company can be increased, “and condition that on annual reporting to council on how they are coordinating their efforts with the other fire companies,” he said.
Council could also back the fire company’s advocacy for a county-wide GPS dispatch system once costs are further examined, not pursue a tax increase until talks progress further, and work to make sure any possible integration ensures all four towns have “a substantive voice and vote” and “our voice is respected” in any decisions.
Plenty of questions
McDevitt and North Penn Fire Company President Ian Horowitz and Chief Dan Mathe detailed specifics where they could work together. Councilman Sherwin Collins asked how long any integration could take, and McDevitt said some is already happening.
“The fire company currently already integrates ‘softly,’ mostly from a response standpoint. We just recently had a fire on Shearer Street, and it wasn’t just North Penn Fire Company; probably a total of 10 to 12 surrounding jurisdictions all responded here,” Horowitz said.
“There once was a time that the local fire companies had enough people to help. Now, as there’s more demands on people on work levels, personal levels, and everything in between, we rely more on local fire companies,” he said.
Other area fire companies like Montgomery Township or Upper Gwynedd frequently call on North Penn for their ladder truck, and joint training exercises are held that allow each to learn how to rely on which units from which companies, the firefighter added. Collins asked about a point raised by the DCED study about cultural issues between the companies, and Horowitz said each may have their own legacies, longtime members, and ways of doing things that may need to be smoothed over during any integration.
“There’s history with our fire company, and a lot of the others. It’s a very prideful organization, in every town that you go. So there’s hurdles to jump, but we’re not really there yet, and in the end we all have the same common goal of protecting the residents of whatever municipality we’re in,” he said.
Resident Al Tenney asked how the three other towns had responded to the report, and McDevitt said the borough and fire company had not yet continued talks with their counterparts on their respective priorities.
“This report is the first official voice to the matter,” he said.
Borough Manager Christine Hart added that she had seen recent references by Upper Gwynedd that talks would continue during their budget workshops planned for October, and each have posted the report, but no joint talks have been held.
“Obviously they’re aware of the DCED findings, they’re aware that volunteerism is not going to be 100 percent sustainable. But we have not come together in a joint municipality meeting, without the conversation and/or guidance from the state,” she said.
Hart asked if the towns could join together to talk to county officials about switching to a GPS-based system, and Mathe said he has worked in other areas where GPS-based systems were used decades ago, and saw no reason why Montgomery County couldn’t do so too.
“It seems silly, we all navigate our lives by it: ‘What’s the closest Wawa near me?’ We’re all doing it, and everyone’s doing it for schools and business, and it seems kinda backwards,” Hart said, and Mathe agreed. “It’s a very old and outdated system,” he said.
‘This is a long way off’
Council President Mark Tarlecki said he has been watching debates at the state legislature level on a bill that would allow towns to increase their local services tax, with increased revenue only allowed to go to emergency fire services, but any such increase would need that state bill to become law first, then an action by council to do so.
“This is a long way off. It’s certainly not going to pass this year,” he said. “We are going to be investigating ways to increase our aid, but we don’t have anything specifically in mind.”
Each fire company currently operates as a private organization separate from its municipality, McDevitt said, and any changes to recordkeeping or recording “would depend greatly on the nature of any consolidation — that is, if it’s among the fire companies themselves or if it’s through the municipalities. The specific details of that would determine how issues like that are handled.”
“The reality is, we have to be serious about how we’re funding, how we’re making sure that our volunteers can be sustainable, and if the sustainability of volunteer departments is going to be lessened, how can we combine forces?” Hart said.
As for the budget, Mathe said, running “a bare-bones firehouse” costs the company about $300,000 per year, and about $100,000 is donated by the two municipalities, leaving “a $200,000 delta” the volunteers use fundraisers and investment income to fill, before any $1 million-plus firetruck purchase or station renovations.
“So every year, we start with a $200,000 gap. Not only are we worrying about fighting fires, we’re now worrying about the funding side, which weighs us down as much as fighting fires,” Mathe said.
North Wales Borough Council next meets at 7 p.m. on Oct. 13 at the borough municipal building, 300 School Street. For more information, visit www.NorthWalesBorough.org.
© 2026 Ambler Gazette, Pa.
Visit www.thereporteronline.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
