WCFA General Meeting Minutes Online Zoom – December 12, 2023 – 1800-2000

President Graves welcomed everybody to the fall online zoom general meeting for the WCFA, informed them that the meeting is being recorded and thanked them for taking time out their evening to come and join us. He shared that we do have quite a bit of information to share.

The meeting was called to order at 1804 hours. 34 Member companies attended along with 4 board members and Danielle.

President Graves asked Danielle to read the minutes from the last meeting, May 23, 2023. Danielle asked the members present if they got the minutes in an e-mail. (It was later discovered that the members@wcfafirefighters.org email was not working). Danielle read the minutes from the last meeting. Some discussion, motion to accept the minutes as read by Dan Shaw, seconded by Greg Bailey, motion passed.

President Grave ask Danielle to present the Treasurer’s report. The account balance in checking is $47,216 and savings is $59,175. Over the summer Danielle created a QuickBooks checking account from within QuickBooks. It made it easier to bill directly from QB and collect payments for records. The payments come into QuickBooks checking account rather than our main checking account. So, the QuickBooks checking account balance is $3003.00. Total of all our bank accounts is $109,394 today. Danielle said she would only use the payment options in QB as needed. All the classes will be paid the same way we have been through the payment page on our website. Danielle also found a way to integrate PayPal into QuickBooks so that she could reconcile that account more easily. President Graves asked if there was an additional cost now that PayPal is integrated? Danielle explained there is not. More discussion followed about the process of taking payments and how QB receives them.

Danielle then shared the Profit & Loss report. The details can be found in the report posted on the website under members resources. A member asked how much money is in the bank, Danielle replied that we have $109,396 overall in the bank accounts right now. More discussion followed. Members asked about the future expenses, what are we going to use the money for? President Graves asked if there were any other questions regarding the Treasurers report?

President Graves asked for a motion to accept the Treasurer’s report. Gordy Reynaud moved to accept it, Dan Shaw seconded, motioned passed.

President Graves asked Danielle to present the training committee topics. Danielle reminded President Graves that we narrowed it down to one item basically and it’s the last item on the agenda is about the S-219 training and I have to throw that one back at you.

So, President Graves proposed to the board, and it generated some discussion about S-219, which is firing operations. We’d like to offer that class in our course list of things that we provide, and the reason why is because the Government is planning on using Contract resources to assist them with more fuels reduction and one of those is burning. President Graves asked the members what they thought and opened it up for discussion. Liability was a topic of discussion; Charlie Curtis was asked if he could teach the class and he’s not sure but said it would be worth looking into. We will possibly send out a questionnaire to the members to see if the class would be needed.

Old Business:
President Graves asked Danielle to share any old business. She let the members present know that the board is working to review and update the bylaws because we want to make sure the code of ethics agrees with that language in the By-Laws. We hope to have that completely updated by the spring and then we would present it for a vote.

Danielle also shared that at the last meeting we talked about her purging the database because a lot of people are finding people in the database who have no records, like somebody probably hired them and them, but then they never took any training or anything. And then there’s a lot of people in database that just haven’t had any activity for years. Danielle shared the process she took to accomplish this. A question was asked about how many were removed, she replied, hundreds. Danielle asked if anybody have any questions?

Next on the agenda is sharing people in the database. We have had issues where employees are linked to several employers and when a company owner tries to add them, they find out they have other employer association that are preventing it. Danielle shared an idea with the board and was asked to share it with the membership. Every employee in the database starts out with a primary employer, the employer who actually added the employee to their company. What she is proposing is that at every year, all second card associations that were added be removed at the end of the season by the employers who added them, unless it is mutually agreed between employers to keep the association. This way employees will go back to their primary employer and can easily be added in the future if needed. She explained how it would be easy to keep track of who second carded people throughout the year. She would audit the list at the end of the season and contact the employers if they didn’t release the employee, they can let her know to go ahead and remove it or they plan to keep the association. Danielle feels this will make it easier for all employees to be available quicker to employers who need them. Danielle asked if anyone had any questions and if this is something they think would be helpful. Danielle gave the floor back to President Graves, some discussion followed.

After the discussion President Graves asked for a motion to move forward with this idea to remove employer association at the end of each season. Dan Shaw’s motion is to clean up the database and make it so that only one employer is basically responsible for that employee. As second was held while Danielle reminded the members that the association don’t have to be dropped if the employers agree to keep them. President Graves asked if she wanted to amend Dan Shaw’s motion. Danielle amended Dan’s motion to read as: Motion to clean up the employer associations to where there is, at minimum one but it is possible to have multiple associations if the companies mutually agree. Danielle then asked Dan to approve her amending his motion. Dan approved it. Greg Bailey seconded the motion, President Graves asked if there was any further discussion? The question was: When you are removing employees, are you leaving them with the last associated employer or the first one? Danielle explained that the idea would be that they would go back with their primary employer, but it depends on how long ago they were with that primary employer, or ever worked for them. It would kind of be case by case basis.

President Graves asked if there was any further discussion? Would anybody like to make a motion to end the discussion? Monty Heggie motioned to end the discussion. Motion passes unanimously.

No other old business.

New business:
President Graves began sharing by saying, a lot of this is informative, but of course it’ll probably generate discussion. I can start by reminding you that myself and board member Reed Gracie, board member Tim Logozzo, and Vice President Bill Bailey all attended the NWSA meeting, as did some other members. If I get something wrong or leave something out, please chime in and if it’s for the good of the Members, let’s inform them best we can. President Graves wants to remind everybody that they know the difference between federal, state and state mob dispatch. Even though the Forest Service and the other cooperators and the DNR. The two biggest for us are the Forest Service and DNR, they are in a combined communication center, and they ordered differently. Also, the incident management teams ordered differently. So, it generates a lot of confusion. And it generates a lot of questions from us. And dispatch has always been messed up. It always will be messed up. All we can do is do our best to keep them on task and to call out when they make mistakes in hopes that they don’t do it again.
State dispatch has told us in writing that they can do anything they want when it comes to dispatch, they can use EERA or whatever they call it this week, they can use the VIPR DPL, they can use closest resources. They will first use DNR resources and all the cooperators’ resources first, usually before they’ll call contract resources from the VIPR list. Keeping that in mind, the DNR does it their way. The Forest Service does a pretty good job of adhering to the VIPR DPL and State Mob. Dispatch is usually done through one of the dispatch centers, usually CWC, and they are not a paying cooperator, CWC and the other dispatch centers do it out of the kindness of their heart, State Mob, people do not fund that dispatch center, so they are doing it to help out and so far they’re not asking for money from State Mob, so keeping that in mind, State Mob dispatch will usually be different. Usually they’ll use the VIPR, DPL, sometimes they use local resources. So, they’re a little bit like the DNR in that way. Yep, they do use closest resources for immediate need and planned need.

We talked to Russ Lane, DNR, in Reno and he agreed to have a meeting with us in January, myself our Vice President and maybe a board member or two plan to attend. Russ oversees fire suppression for the state. Russ’ assistant and some of his regional managers and other managers are expected too also be there. We also plan to invite dispatchers to the meeting. President Graves will probably send out an inquiry to all the membership and ask them to give him a list of questions they would like asked. We also plan to visit the State Mob people and try to get a meeting with them before or after the DNR meeting. We would also like to get a little time to meet with Senator Short and Representative Kratz. President Graves asked if there any other questions about State dispatch? More discussion followed. Greg Baily clarified that when they were talking about using closest resources for the prescribed burn, you all need to remember, they did explain that it would be at severity rate for burning. So that’s only three-quarter rate. You only get paid for while you’re on the job. You do not get paid for travel; they do not pay per diem for housing anybody. So, that’s why they’re going to use closest resources.

The next topic is Onboarding. This just in case somebody doesn’t know what onboarding is, is the federal government are planning on opening the solicitation each year in the new five-year agreements. Most of us in general are against this because, new contractors that are onboarding know everybody else’s last price that they bid. More discussion followed about the negative impacts of onboarding. Greg Bailey shared that a woman at the NWSA conference that shared about this topic stood up, and with a straight face, told us that we do not have enough contractors under contract to handle our season. A comment was made of how can that be, when we had people sitting all summer. Overloaded dispatch lists DPL, people did not work. Greg also asked if it would be worthwhile to throw some money at fighting this.

President Graves reminded everyone that we already have a voice, we’ve been giving money to David Spady, a lobbyist with NWSA. The wheels in DC do not turn fast at all, so it it’s just another battle we’ve got to fight, but we do have a somebody back there that is fighting for us.

President Graves moved on to the next topic, wages. The federal minimum wage is going up to $17.20 an hour, however, the federal firefighter minimum wage is going up to $26.48 an hour. That’s over a $10.00 an hour wage hike, you also have to add on the new Health and Welfare rate of $4.98 an hour onto that wage for the first 40 hours. After 40 hours in a work week, you can drop the Health and Welfare, but then you’re in time and a half overtime status. More discussion followed. It was noted that if we’re going to maintain the same profit margin, we’re going to have to add somewhere around $1500 a day to our daily rate, works out to about 30% more. Heads at the contracting office say they’re making the adjustments to accept those bids. President Graves worries that there’s probably going to be some non-member companies that don’t follow the rules and we’ll see that when the DPL’s come out. He said we’ll continue to educate ourselves on this and keep people informed. More discussion followed.
Reed Gracie shared about problems with physical addresses in SAM. If you can’t search for your address on USPS.com SAM may not be able to validate your address. Plan ahead in case you have a PO Box, it could take some time to get it done.

If you’re not paying sick leave, here is the US DOL required sick leave payment. Your workers accrue one hour, paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. You can estimate the time workers will work in connection with this rather than the one-hour thing. So, you can give them sick time right up front. Contractors can provide a worker with at least 56 hours of sick leave at the beginning of each accrual year, 56 is the max. Workers must be notified in writing of the amount of sick leave they have at the end of each pay period or each month, whichever interval is shorter. Others may occur up to 56 hours each year and can carry it over unused paid sick leave from one year to the next. Contractors can limit the amount accrued to 56 hours at any point in time. If they leave your employment, are they entitled to pay at their hourly rate for the 56 hours? I think the answer to that is yes. Does anybody have any other thoughts on that who attended the meeting? Questions. Comments on that? It was noted that they didn’t think that the sick leave had to be paid out if the employee left, but if they came back to your company within a year then. It picked up right where it left off. More discussion followed.

Other US DOL items are you need to have a separate authorization for driving for your company. So, make sure that you have a form for that and have the employee sign because DOL will look for that. This would be a company form, there might be one available on the US DOL website.

Remember, if you’re paying a daily rate you have to keep track of the hours and show the employee on their pay stub that what hours are regular time and what hours are overtime. You also need to show any other items that you pay them. If you don’t pay your employees as per law, the DOL will make sure you pay that employee back double.

DOL licensing stuff is no longer a novelty, and everybody should get on board. That was the lady who spoke from the DOL US DOL at the end of SA meeting was completely familiar with firefighters. Andrea Rasmussen from US DOL, her phone number is 208. 297-9655.

Membership update:
President Graves asked Danielle if there were any membership updates. Danielle replied that Port Blakely is an associate member, and they just had a change in who was managing their membership. So she had them fill out a new application and board accepted the new application.

President Graves called on Reed Gracie who had a comment about the cards we use and maybe updating them. Reed explained that he was reaching out to everyone to see if we would like to modernize our incident qualification cards. Some discussion followed. President Graves asked if there anybody opposed to us working on modernizing our incident qualification cards. No opposition, Danielle will talk to our database admin and see what can be done.

President Graves ask if there was another new business? Danielle shared that we got a new publication for the Fitness test and she will be adding it to the website under members resources. She discussed how the new form included has the time listed. For the past few years some have been just writing pass instead of the time. After some discussion we decided that since they included a form that requires a time to be listed that we would follow that and no longer allow just pass to be written in.

President Graves asked if there is any other new business?
Mike Meyers asked if Fire Departments have to comply with the DOL requirements. They don’t have to follow the Farm labor. MSPA rules. More discussion followed.

President Graves asked if there was anything else under new business? Some discussion followed about engine staffing and types. There was also discussion on the new bid rollovers for WH. Wondering if the CO feel we are greedy or just covering our costs. There was concern that the fire departments might get called instead because there cheaper. They feel the government needs to know about this. In example a District Type 5 engine that’s not union and they’re basically getting paid individually by the state. They become a state employee, and the engine gets paid separate. That engine costs somewhere between $2500 and $3000 a day. So that’s the comparisons here. We’re going to do our best to start showing the government those differences, especially our state government. President Graves shared that he thinks we can send letters and try to get some of this information into David Spady so he can approach it at a federal level. We should also send letters to our contracting officers, which again by now this has all been set in stone for a while, we’ll see. Maybe we can make a change. We also need to tell the media.

Matt Hanson has a question. My question is: If we’re going to forecast the surplus based on the Treasury report and we have lobbying efforts in place and we have a working relationship with the national. Membership associations and NWSA, how do we approach this in a good manner where we can present the data in a format that’s going to show these folks a what we’re dealing with financially when it comes to running a small business and how the impacts that the government are implementing on us are negatively impacting and stopping contractors from coming into this business to provide support services. It seems like a pretty straightforward approach, but I’m wondering if that’s something that we as an association move forward with. President Graves agreed and said that he thinks writing letters to the contracting officers and write letters to the NWSA so they can hear our voice too. And like we just talked about we need to write letters to our politicians. I don’t know what kind of positive or negative impact going to the media would do, probably not positive. We have to be careful with that. I’m not against it, but we’ve got to be careful. But definitely we can all contact our politicians, and we can even make a form letter. And each one of us in the association can send that to our poll. There is strength in numbers, and we can use that. More discussion followed. A noted comment in the discussion was about the firefighter’s union. It’s a very strong, wealthy union. The Washington State Council of Fire Chiefs and firefighters have a building right next to the Capitol in Olympia. They’re very strong and they are pushing the Fire Defense Committee hard on making all firefighters out there, union firefighters and that’s what we’re up against. At the conclusion of this discussion President Graves said, “Good job, Matt. I’m going to ask you to help us write the letter”.

Kurt Bartelheimer asked if there was any follow up from the Pendleton meeting. President Graves explained no, we didn’t do too much follow up on it. Basically, there is a report out that I can send out to the membership that came out from Jaime De Vilia. If you want to read that, they basically had a stenographer there, so they got basically word for word what we talked about. It was kind of the normal stuff. Tim Logozzo and Greg Bailey also attended. There was a representative there from the Oregon State Fire Marshall’s office and he gave a pretty good presentation and made us and the federal cooperators very aware of what they’re doing, what they have, what you know their limitations are and all that stuff, by the way, that Oregon State Fire Marshall’s office has two incident management teams in the state. Our state Fire Marshall’s office does not have a team.

President Graves asked if there was any other discussion? Some discussion followed.

One last item under new business. We have a member who said that one of their engine bosses took his life unexpectedly. He left a wife and two kids and new mortgage. The Board discussed this, and we are bringing it to the membership to approve sending the widow $1000. Discussion followed and $2000 was proposed.

President Graves asked if anybody opposed to sending the family $2000? All approved! Danielle will send this out after the meeting.

President Graves then shared the passing of his father, Tom Graves on November 29th. He wanted to mention that Tom was a founding member of this association and a smoke jumper. Todd made note of an upcoming memorial that all interested would be invited to.

Bill Dugay jumped in with a comment. One of the scariest things I’m hearing is the wage increases. He’s not opposed to raising bids, but it’s scary to raise bids that much if you don’t think everybody’s raising bids. So, the more information we get out to everybody associated with WCFA and beyond about what it probably is going to cost you to employ and run an engine. So, the more information we have, the more likely people are to comfortably raise their bids. President Graves agreed but commented that the first year that somebody doesn’t raise their bid, which is likely going to be. 2024, those employees sometimes are going to talk. Some contractors will say, “oh, I wasn’t aware”. We’ll say BS to that. They’ll probably be some more information from the government on that, but it’s going to take this first year and that first fire where these employees run into each other and ask, “how much you making”? Some discussion followed.

Greg Bailey asked about setting up a benevolent fund. President Grave said that for right now we’ll consider handling it, unless we hear otherwise from the Members, on a case-by-case basis.

Some discussion followed on unionizing and researching it.

President Graves asked for any other discussion or new business. A member asked for one last thing before we close, as far as the wage minimum requirements go where can we find it? Finality in terms of that in terms of that direction from the government. And what can we expect for future communications between now and February? President Graves explained that he thinks as things evolve, we’ll do our best to communicate. Now, a lot of this information is going to come out in the rollover/solicitation. So, look for that wage determination schedule that’s in the center of your contract. I would bet that our contracting officers will send out some information as well. Maybe the US DOL will have some information and where else, Greg, where else would we find that get that information from? You’re muted. Anybody else have thoughts on what else we might find that updated information?

Spring meeting TBD

President Graves asked for a motion to adjourn the meeting, Jake Weigley made a motion, Dave Rains seconded. Motion passed, meeting adjourned at 2030.

Merry Christmas!