INDIANAPOLIS — After many months of planning and coordinating, the merger between the Wayne Township Fire Department and the Indianapolis Fire Department will no longer be pursued.
According to a joint statement by the City of Indianapolis, Wayne Township Fire Department and Indianapolis Professional Firefighters Local 416, WTFD will remain its own entity "for the foreseeable future."
The entire statement can be read below:
“Over the last six months we’ve been discussing merging the Wayne Township Fire Department with the Indianapolis Fire Department. It has been an open and productive conversation that included deep dives into finances, operations, personnel, and the tax structures that support the fire protection services. However, given the complexity of this multi-million-dollar merger, all parties have agreed it will not be feasible to complete by January 1, 2025, as we had initially hoped and planned. For now, and for the foreseeable future, the Wayne Township Fire Department will remain its own entity providing fire services to Wayne Township residents.
We thank the teams from the City of Indianapolis, Wayne Township, Local 416 and both fire departments for their hard work on this merger and we look forward to continuing our long partnership to provide world-class fire protection to Indianapolis.”
Wayne Township had discussed the possibility of a fire department merger for nearly a year due to budgetary reasons.
In an interview with WRTV, Wayne Township communications director Jeff Harris said the township no longer needs to merge the fire department because of how the township's emergency medical services department merger with Indianapolis has gone.
"We're talking millions of dollars that has been passed back to the township in savings, that has enabled us to be in a much stronger position moving forward," Harris said. "We have enough revenue to sustain the world-class fire service that Wayne Township residents have always had, so we're not concerned about that in any way."
Harris said the two entities had still organized weekly merger discussion meetings, but they ran out of time to reach a deal by New Year's Day.
"With that clock ticking, we just decidede that IFD and Wayne Township needed to plan ahead, start their own union contract negotiations, and plan budgets for future years," Harris said.
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