For many months now, the Laurelton Fire District board of fire commissioners and the Ridge Culver Fire District board of fire commissioners have been working on consolidating into a new fire district.

Beginning with a study conducted by CGR back in 2019, the districts began looking at the potential to improve service while saving money on future expenses by consolidating their efforts into a new unified fire district. Doing so will unify the membership, careers staff, administrative staff into a new agency which will work together to provide the highest levels of fire and life safety protection. It will allow the new district to control costs for things like personnel and fire apparatus while keeping the budget, and subsequent tax rate, lower than if the departments continued on their solo paths.

The new agency will be formed at a future meeting of the boards which will create the Irondequoit Fire District (IFD). This new district will be comprised of the former Ridge Culver Fire District and the former Laurelton Fire District. The new IFD will continue to provide fire and life safety services from the current stations located on Empire Blvd and Culver Rd using the current apparatus and career staff. Residents will see little change to the services they currently receive but for improved response capability.

Our leaders and members are very excited for this new district and continue to work hard to make it happen. The new department patch has been approved at the last meeting on 2/2/22 and is presented here. Additionally, a target date has been established for the merge into the new district. The target date is May 16th, 2022 and confidence is high that we will be able to make that the first day of the new IFD. There are some factors that remain to be resolved in the process, so it is not 100% to be that date, but it is looking very good at this point.

There are merger meetings held once per month and they ARE open to the public. The next meeting will be held on Wednesday March 9th at 6:30 pm at the Laurelton Firehouse located at 405 Empire Blvd.

Prior to the merge there will be a public hearing where the public is encouraged to hear about the consolidation plan and comment on it. That date has not yet been set, but will be published when it is determined.

There will be much more news as we progress through the next 4 months and we're excited to begin showing visible progress like this.