The Board of Alderman unanimously voted to eliminate the residency clause for fire fighters at their meeting Feb. 19. Chief William Grantham, Jr. presented the request for the removal of the clause to the board.
According to Grantham, the clause is a one-line statement that saying, “All newly hired employees of the fire and police department not residing in Oktibbeha County must live inside Oktibbeha County within the first six months of their employment.”
Tuesday’s meeting only addressed the clause in reference to the Fire Department; it did not address the Police Department.
Grantham said Starkville’s Board of Aldermen adopted the original clause around 1975.
“The reason was we only had a few fire fighters, so the city relied upon the callback fighters. Since we have better pagers and transportation, the clause was changed to say you only have to live within the county. Since that point, nothing else has been done,” Grantham said.
According to Grantham, the clause is outdated and unnecessary.
Mississippi State student Christian Reed said outdated laws and clauses should be removed or revised.
“The residency clause is an example of this. As long as the fire department feels like they can adequately serve Starkville with the removal of such a clause, I believe eliminating it was a good decision. If the Fire Department has a hard time finding individuals who are willing to live in Starkville, perhaps that is a far more serious problem,” Reed said.
“This (clause) is viewed as an old traditional regulation. The city basically gets no benefit out of it anymore. The fire fighters come to work at 7 a.m. and leave the next morning at 7 a.m., and we don’t see them again until their next shift,” Grantham said.
Grantham said removing the clause will not decrease the effectiveness of the Fire Department.
“There are not nearly as many fires as there used to be. About 99.5 percent of the problems are handled with just the staff on duty anyway,” Grantham said. “We used to have only seven people working per shift, now we run 15 people per shift. We’ve doubled the manpower.”
Now that the clause is no longer in effect, fire fighters are free to live outside of Oktibbeha County if they choose.
According to Grantham, many of the other cities around Starkville, such as Columbus, Tupelo and Grenada have already eliminated their residency clauses. West Point is currently working to eliminate its.
“These other fire departments are also beginning to raise the salary so we could lose our trained workers to them. If we can’t be competitive with the salary, we have to at least be competitive with the benefits,” Grantham said.