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RHFD rating improves, homeowners to save
Richmond Hill Fire Department

The city of Richmond Hill expects homeowners to save an average of $181 a year in insurance costs after its ISO rating dropped from Class 4 to Class 3.

Fire Chief Ralph Catlett made the announcement at Tuesday night’s city council meeting.

“This is the result of a lot of work by our firefighters and the support of the mayor, council and city manager,” Catlett said. “This amount of improvement in such a short time is almost unheard of.”

Catlett said the city’s rating in 2013 was 60.67, which the Insurance Service Organization barely considers a Class 4 rating. The new rating is 74.56, which is just five points away from a Class 2.

The insurance savings to homeowners should equal about $900,000 per year cumulatively, or $2.7 million over the three years that the rating is good for.

This follows another insurance savings that the city announced in July under which eligible flood insurance policy holders can expect to save $120 on flood insurance through Richmond Hill’s voluntary participation in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Community Rating System.

ISO, the Insurance Services Office, rates municipal fire departments using what it calls a Public Protection Classification to assess fire protection efforts in a particular community, then assigns a rating of Class 1 to Class 10. The lower the classification, the better the insurance rates homeowners can receive.

Catlett said Richmond Hill is one of only 69 fire departments in Georgia with a Class 3 or better rating out of 1,038, putting it in the top 4 percent. It is also among the top 5 percent nationally out of more than 49,000 fire departments.

“In the past two years, the city has remodeled one station, purchased 24 new air packs and other equipment, purchased a new engine and hired more personnel,” Catlett said. “Additionally, we have modernized our records and reporting system with new software that allows us to maintain records that are vital to the ISO evaluation.”

Catlett added that two years ago the department had no pre-fire plans for local businesses. It now has 700, which gave the department the maximum of 12 points in that category under the ISO evaluation.

Mayor Harold Fowler praised Catlett, who was hired in January 2014.

“In the short amount of time you’ve been here, you have accomplished some amazing things,” Fowler said.

“I’m very proud of our fire department personnel for their hard work and dedication,” Catlett said. “While our new classification may lead to reduced property insurance rates, it is our ability to respond and potentially save lives that are most important.”

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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