Commissioner John J. Priest was re-elected to the East Meadow Fire District’s Board of Commissioners at the annual fire district elections on Tuesday, December 10, 2024.
Priest has served the district’s fire department for more than 40 years. He has served twice as company captain (1999 and 2015) and twice as chief of the East Meadow Fire Department (2003 and 2012).
One of the largest responsibilities that the board has is to allocate the funding necessary to operate and maintain the fire department. The commissioner said the struggle with this lies in an issue that all fire departments have to face.
“We order a piece of fire equipment like that [tower ladder fire truck], and we find out it’s 33 months to get a new truck in,” Priest said. “Now you have a 25-year-old piece of apparatus that is aging out of your fleet, and because of the delays in getting new apparatus, you have to somehow support that apparatus for three more years until your new one is ready.”
Priest also noted that the price of new apparatus has heavily increased, making it even harder to acquire them. “The biggest thing is how to use the taxpayers’ funds to get the things we need at a value that respects the taxpayers’ money,” he said.
Priest made it a point to mention that all of the actions of the fire district’s board are meant to serve the needs of the firefighters and EMS workers. Fire district boards typically include five members, but the East Meadow Fire District has functioned short-handed for a few months.
“We here at East Meadow face a bit of a challenge because at the end of October, one of our sitting commissioners passed away suddenly, so we are looking at different options to see how that seat will be filled,” Priest said.
James Surless had been a member of the East Meadow Fire Department for over 60 years. He served as a company captain in 1971, 1972, and 1975, as well as Chief of the Department in 1980 and 1981. Surless had been a sitting member of the board since 1997, a position that Priest said filling would be a priority as he enters his new term.
Priest is also on the Board of Directors of the East Meadow Chamber of Commerce.
The East Meadow Fire Department covers East Meadow and parts of Levittown and Westbury.
