Merced adds new firefighters

Merced City Fire brought on five new members for its crew on Friday, a move city leaders hope will alleviate staffing issues.

Thomas Beard, Jack Jones, Samuel Rametta, Paul Skifter and Aaron Vasquez were sworn in Friday at City Hall by Chief Shawn Henry, according to a news release.

In the proposed 2016-17 fiscal year budget, the city has set aside about $700,000 in overtime dollars to maintain staffing and avoid so-called brownouts whenever possible. A policy that used brownouts, when the department was sometimes short-staffed, had been in place since 2012 but ended about a year ago.

City Manager Steve Carrigan said this week that adding five new firefighters may help keep the overtime spending down and allow the city to properly staff the Merced Municipal Airport during the takeoffs and landings of planes.

Beard, 23, comes to Merced from Bakersfield, where he earned an associate’s in fire technology at Bakersfield College. He was a reserve firefighter there.

Fresno native Jones, 25, studied at Clovis Community College and Allan Hancock College, which is in Santa Barbara County.

Rametta, who studied at the University of San Francisco and Santa Ana College, is originally from Newport Beach. The 30-year-old wrote a novel called “Solstice,” which was published in 2011.

Skifter, 30, of San Francisco studied at Modesto Junior College, before joining the Merced crew. He served in the Navy for five years, seeing two deployments to the Middle East.

Also from Fresno, Vasquez studied at Fresno City College and Union University, which is based in Tennessee. He’s 25.

Each new firefighter will make $51,487 in annual salary plus benefits, which are typical of the first step in the salary schedule.

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 6:13 PM with the headline "Merced adds new firefighters."