Home Care In East Hartford, CT

Fire officials across the state are raising concerns about fewer applicants and volunteers joining the ranks of fire departments amid long-term financial concerns and health risks of the profession.

In an example of the thinning ranks, the town of East Hartford is spending $2.8 million so far this year for overtime for its firefighters to make up for a shortfall of 11 vacancies in the department.

In the past two years 26 firefighters have retired from the department now staffed at 103 members.

East Hartford Assistant Fire Chief Stephen Alsup said the department is recruiting actively to replace those positions but it finds itself like other departments in the state facing new challenges: Half the number of applicants that used to seek the jobs are applying to become firefighters, making it harder to fill such positions.

“I have never seen this in my 30 years,” Alsup said. “We have always had an overabundant number of applicants.”

“Benefits are not what they used to be”

A study from the Office of the State Comptroller on fire departments shows that the number of firefighters in the state has dropped by at least 50% since 2016-17.

Fire and state officials cite a crisis with the retention and recruitment of firefighters explaining that inadequate pension and benefits remain top concerns, particularly in a dangerous profession with increased calls, more training requirements and fewer interest in volunteering.

As a result, fire departments are left to rely more on mutual aid and overtime of its firefighters, with concerns that this will lead to more burnout, officials said.

“The amount of people who are signing up to put their life on the line is decreasing because in many ways the benefits are not what they used to be,” said state Comptroller Sean Scanlon.

Scanlon led the study, explaining his personal interest as a grandson of a firefighter and hearing from different fire departments that they did not feel there was progress with recruitment and retention of firefighters.

“A lot of times today people who sign up for these jobs are promised 401ks and sometimes they are not even promised really good health insurance,” he said.

“You have a young person sitting there saying why would I sign up for this really dangerous job if the one thing that made that dangerous job palatable maybe for my dad and grandfather who were in this business was the secure retirement and the benefits that they deserve to do this dangerous job,” Scanlon said.

“A lot of towns are in crisis because over the last 10 to 15 years many have moved away from good benefits and a pension.”

The report states that since 2016-17 there were an estimated 26,800 firefighters, down 50% compared to the latest data last year showing there were 13,401 firefighters in the state.

Volunteer firefighters make up the majority of firefighters in the state currently at 8,337, with the remaining 4,738 career firefighters.

While the number of career firefighters increased by 6.5% since 2016-17, the number of volunteer firefighters dropped by 62.7% compared to 2016-17, the study found.

Retention and recruitment

Peter Brown, president of the Uniformed Professional Fire Fighters Association of Connecticut, which represents under 4,000 career firefighters, said on the recruitment side he has seen the number of applicants testing for his department across the state dwindle down.

“When I got into the fire department in 1997, 1000 people applied and now departments are seeing 100 to 200. Some places are exhausting their hiring lists before they expire. They run out of people that are eligible to be hired.”

Brown said another challenge is when a firefighter gets hired some will observe what the makeup and pay is and then jump around until they find a department they like.

“When you get someone it is hard to lock them in for a career when they are bouncing from two to three departments,” he said.

Further, Brown concurred with Scanlon that pay and benefits have diminished, another contributing factor to recruitment.

“If we do not have a pipeline that is refreshing those ranks and getting people interested and we do not have good uniformed benefits across the board in different cities and towns this problem will get worse and worse,” Scanlon said.

Alsup said the applicant pool is shrunk further in East Hartford because applicants must also be certified as paramedics. But he emphasized there are still qualified candidates.

The desire to pursue such a career has shifted, he added.

“Firefighting is hard,” he said. “It takes dedication. The folks that come up in our recruitment are dedicated to this job. I think you look at the shift away from trades and a push toward college.”

Glastonbury Fire Chief Michael Thurz said some people are experiencing burnout.

“Do you want to get up in the middle of the night for nothing and answer an automatic fire alarm?” he said. “You have to decide to do that and a willingness to do that. The family has to understand what is going on in the middle of the night.”

Avon Fire Chief Bruce Appell said the hardest part of retention is keeping people happy and motivated and engaged.

“It is a tough business,” he said. “It is the stress of what we do and the things that we see.”

Making the commitment

Fire officials said the number of volunteers have dropped in the department with lifestyle changes and more time commitments elsewhere making it hard to join the ranks.

Coventry Fire Chief Bud Meyers, who also serves as president of the Connecticut Fire Chiefs Association, said the responsibilities of firefighters has also increased from additional training to departments now responding to medical calls and addressing hazardous materials.

“It is hard for people to associate the time away from the family like they used to,” he said. “And a lot of families because of the way the economy is both parents are working and to offset the cost they don’t have the ability to volunteer as readily as they used to.”

Thurz said in Glastonbury, which is a volunteer department, he has 70 people volunteering but it does not mean they will all become available if there is a large fire because of people’s other obligations.

“You don’t know when you are going to be called upon and If I am going to dinner with my family I am not taking my family to a call,” he said describing the life of volunteer firefighters.

Alsup said volunteerism is down including participation in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.

Further, Scanlon said many who have volunteered in the fire service are moving on to jobs as career firefighters, reducing the number of volunteers.

Appell, which has a volunteer fire department in Avon, also holding steady at 70, said people need to step up and join the department.

“Less people are joining and everyone is aging out,” he said. “They can’t do that job anymore.”

The fire service years ago was more generational with family members following in the footsteps of their parents. This is now not as common, fire officials said.

Cancer

With cancer the No 1 killer of firefighters in the service, with 75% of line of duty deaths due to occupational cancer, some people do not have an interest in the profession, preferring not to take the risk.

Studies have shown over the years that “PFAS, Per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of fluorinated chemicals known as “forever chemicals” were found in all three layers of firefighter turnout gear, “linked to cancer and other serious health effects,” according to the IAFF.

“When I started in 1997 there was very little talk of cancer,” Brown said. “I think you saw the cancer boom somewhere in the 2000s up until today with the introduction of PFAS chemicals in the turnout gear.”

Alsup said certainly the risks are there.

“Firefighting has always been inherently risky whether the dangerousness of the job and cardiac and cancer and those types of things,” he said.

But he said his department has done a lot to mitigate those risks, including testing PFAS free gear and removing PFAS foam from its trucks.

The department also provides free yearly health screenings to its firefighters.

Mutual aid

With fire departments having fewer firefighters, Meyers said they are forced to rely on mutual aid more frequently.

“What ends up happening is the less you have for manpower gives more of the workload on the members of the department who are still around and when you do that it puts more of a burden on them and creates burnout,” he said. “The average volunteer stays three to five years in the fire departments.”

Solutions

Scanlon said the state is not doing enough to market a career in firefighting to young people.

“If we were to put some resources into that like we do for other professions we would see more people getting interested,” he said. “But we can’t build the infrastructure for a marketing campaign and not have the other problems addressed.

In Rocky Hill, there is a waiting list to join the volunteer fire department with 72 firefighters serving in the community.

“One of the best things that we did, believe it or not, was…signs we got during election season,” to alert people about volunteering, said Rocky Hill Fire Chief Michael Garrahy.

Scanlon oversees the health insurance plans for many municipalities known as the Partnership Plan and the pension plan known as MERS.

“What I am trying to do through the plans that I run is offer towns an affordable way to provide those kinds of benefits to their employees,” he said. “If you see more towns doing that this problem will get better and if we market more you will get more people applying.”

Brown said as he approaches the end of his career he is working with young people and trying to address the problem through legislation including bills that increase recruitment and retention in the fire service.

“We really got to figure out what the root problem is and do what we can to promote the profession,” he said. “It is a great profession and a noble calling and I do not want to think about the prospect of not being able to recruit enough firefighters to fill all these positions down the road.”

The new owner of an East Hartford hotel wants to give it a fresh new look in the near future.

The Hampton Inn & Suites on 351 Pitkin St., East Hartford, was sold for $15 million, according to a deed that was signed on March 6. The hotel's new owner, Vinay Patel, said he was drawn to having a hotel in the Hartford area by the Connecticut River. Patel, who owns several hotels across the country, added that he is also working on building another Hampton Inn & Suites in New Haven, which he aims to open up in June.

Patel said that the East Hartford hotel building, which was built in 2010, will remain a Hampton Inn & Suites and adds he plans to do some "major renovations" over the next 15 months. Among the renovations will be new carpets, new TVs, new beds, new bathrooms, a repainted exterior and a new sign. Patel said that the renovations are expected to cost around $7 million.

"We plan to gut the inside of the property... Once the architecture plans and design get approved, it goes to the Hilton. Once the Hilton approves it, we will start ordering the furniture and do whatever updates we need to do," Patel said. "My architect and my designer are still going through the process."

Patel added that during renovations, one floor will be done at a time and the hotel will remain open during construction. The East Hartford Hampton Inn & Suites has a total of 121 guest rooms, according to Hilton's website. It also has an indoor pool and a gym.

The 2025 Vendor-in-Place (VIP) Road Paving List encompasses 10.13 total miles of rehabilitation and/or resurfacing of streets throughout town. These roads were selected based on their overall condition and the need for repairs. The project includes the following streets:

The entire length of the road will be resurfaced under the limits listed in the table.* Will need CNG to complete gas services first. If completed in 2025, the Town will mill and pave.

A plan to transform much of East Hartford’s aging Founders Plaza office park into about 1,000 apartments mixed with commercial development could get a big infusion of funding through the property taxes the project generates.

A team of investors that includes prominent area businessmen have already spent millions of dollars aggregating five properties within the office park along the Connecticut River for the “Port Eastside” development.

Now, state lawmakers are considering a bill that would create a special taxing district around those roughly 30 acres.

The legislature’s Planning and Development Committee will hold a public hearing on March 10, to discuss the creation of the “Port Eastside Infrastructure Improvement District,” which would be able to raise funds through bonding to pay for infrastructure, including utilities, roads, a planned greenway, garage and more, said East Hartford Mayor Connor Martin.

A “tax increment financing” agreement with the town would entitle this new district to a portion of the property taxes generated by the added value of the development. Those tax dollars would then help pay down any bonds.

“We are in favor of this because it supports the project and funnels a portion of the revenue back to the municipality,” Martin said.

Tax increment financing is a tool municipalities and developers have long used to defray the costs of infrastructure and other groundwork needed for large-scale developments. Proponents note TIF agreements cost municipalities nothing other than a portion of the tax revenue they would not have seen anyway without the new development.

Martin said the town has not yet negotiated how much of the newly generated tax revenue will go toward the development.

The Port Eastside project plans call for about 1,000 multifamily units in several buildings. These would mostly be apartments, but could include a handful of condominium units. The project would also include a 6.1-mile greenway and 400,000 square feet of entertainment, restaurant and retail space, according to a prior statement from Port Eastside LLC.

The development was introduced as an $841 million investment in the summer of 2023. Plans have since been updated without any new cost estimates being shared by the development team.

Investors in the development include brothers Bruce and Harris Simons, of Simons Real Estate Group in West Hartford; Manafort Brothers Inc. President Jim Manafort; Peter S. Roisman, head of Houston-based property tech company REV Leasing; Nicholas Michnevitz III, president of West Hartford-based MBH Architecture; Hoffman Auto Group Co-Chairman Jeffrey S. Hoffman; Chris Reilly, president of Hartford-based Lexington Partners; and Alan Lazowski, chairman and founder of LAZ Parking.

Port Eastside has spent millions acquiring five properties.

East Hartford’s Town Council about a year ago approved conditions that will allow the development team to use a $6.5 million state grant to demolish the 182,890-square-foot former Bank of America office building at 20 Hartland St., also known as 99 Founders Plaza.

In return, Port Eastside agreed to secure a building permit for an apartment building of at least 150 units on that site within four years.

Despite uncertainties to the U.S. economy as the Trump administration installs new tariffs, aerospace giant RTX appears to be pushing ahead with a new office building for engineering staff at the East Hartford headquarters of its Pratt & Whitney jet engine subsidiary.

Plans call for the Pratt & Whitney building to have seven floors totaling 465,000 square feet of office space, according to revised filings with the city of East Hartford. That's nearly half as much larger than its initial plan for 313,000 square feet on five floors.

RTX acquired Pratt & Whitney in April 2020 along with Collins Aerospace, as part of predecessor company Raytheon's merger with United Technologies, long based in Farmington. The deal was completed weeks into the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic which had a significant impact on air travel that year. Travel demand is rebounding, however, and airlines are pushing ahead with orders for new passenger planes and jet engines.

A new building could represent a vote of confidence for McLean, Virginia-based RTX in Connecticut, where new office buildings have been a rarity in the past decade with a few exceptions, including the Pratt & Whitney engineering building which opened in 2017, totaling 425,000 square feet for up to 1,750 workers, and the Charter Communications headquarters in Stamford.

Pratt & Whitney is among the few Connecticut businesses that is reverting office attendance to pre-pandemic norms, with the company employing roughly 11,000 people in East Hartford and Middletown at last report.

An RTX spokesperson reiterated on Thursday the company's past stance: the East Hartford building remains a conceptualization for now, without saying what could trigger any decision to begin construction.

"We continually assess our Connecticut campus and options to improve on our current footprint to meet the needs of our business," said RTX spokesperson Chris Johnson in an email response Thursday to CT Insider. "This site plan review in no way signals a commitment to build. This is simply a required step as we review and consider our real estate options."

If built, it could bump up tax revenue for East Hartford over time given the higher valuation for a larger new building. Pratt & Whitney's headquarters campus had an appraised value of $155.6 million at last estimate by the city, not including machinery and other property that pushed the total campus value above $206 million.

“With the expanded plan for the new office building, I see an increased investment in the East Hartford community, and look forward to seeing how we can help it come to fruition," said East Hartford Mayor Connor Martin on Thursday. "More occupied offices means more employees coming to work in town, eating lunch at our local restaurants, and hopefully, families moving closer to their jobs and buying homes here in town."

Pratt & Whitney has been scrambling the past two years to replace engine parts made with a metallic powder that may have been exposed to contamination. Airlines have been forced to ground planes for months as engines were removed and replacement parts installed. The recall resulted in a $1.5 billion operating loss in 2023, which Pratt & Whitney recouped last year with a $2 billion profit.

Spirit Airlines blamed a bankruptcy restructuring it initiated last year in part on the Pratt & Whitney recall, as planes were grounded for replacement parts. And in January, a JetBlue executive singled the Pratt & Whitney engine issue out as one of a few "big challenges" faced by the budget airline along with systemic air-traffic control issues, during a conference call in late January, and said negotiations are continuing for a settlement agreement with Pratt & Whitney and RTX.

"It's a very material impact to our business," said Ursula Hurley, chief financial officer of JetBlue, speaking in late January. "The settlement negotiations are taking a while, quite frankly. Because of the materiality to the business, we want to ensure that we settle with something that is fair and acceptable."

As it proceeds with the recall and looks ahead to certification this summer of its new GTF Advantage engine, Pratt & Whitney design engineers have multiple new engines on the books. That includes plans for a jet engine under the Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion engine program the U.S. Department of Defense wants for a new class of fighters; and a "rotating detonation" engine Pratt & Whitney is eyeing to provide greater range and thrust for supersonic missiles.

Pratt & Whitney has given no indication whether any contracts in the new programs could result in hiring in Connecticut. On Friday, the International Machinists Union has scheduled a strike authorization vote among its members, as IAM looks for extra leverage in negotiations for a new contract.

Includes prior reporting by Steven Goode and Paul Schott.