Hannibal mayor delivers short-term solution for fire department salaries; long-term fix in state legislature’s hands

HANNIBAL — After last week’s Hannibal City Council meeting, Mayor Barry Louderman asked firefighters who were considering leaving the Hannibal Fire Department (HFD) for other higher-paying positions to “give (him) a week or so” to come up with a short-term fix for the department’s funding-related issues.

Less than a week later, he delivered.

“I kept saying, you know, ‘Just give me the time to get it together, and I’ll get it together,’” Louderman said during a phone call Wednesday night. “Once I found that number that worked, it was just getting the council to agree and then moving it forward from there.”

Starting Feb. 21, the base salary for incoming firefighters will increase from $40,000 to $42,200, an increase of 5.5 percent. The starting salary for new police officers will increase from $48,000 to $50,880.

Combined with the increases firefighters and policemen each received at the beginning of the current fiscal year in July, both departments’ starting salaries will have increased by 7 percent since June 2024. They also will each receive an additional 3 percent raise in July.

The new base rate is still far below the $48,000 base rate that Steven Meyer, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 1211, said would make the department competitive with others in the region. However, he’s grateful the City Council came up with something.

“I don’t think that the council was at a position where they could afford any more … I’m pretty thankful they were able to rally from what the Tuesday meeting was like and make a better situation than what it had been,” Meyer said in a phone interview earlier this week.

“What it had been” resulted in a heated, hour-long debate at last week’s meeting on funding disparities at HFD. More than 40 people have left the department since Meyer started in 2017, with seven of them leaving since December.

At the meeting, Will Baker, a 16-year veteran of the department, described the conditions of the department when he started: three 12-man crews (fully staffed) plus additional community service support; a lower percentage in pension contributions; and affordable health insurance that enabled he and his wife to have their first child — born via emergency C-section — for $200.

“Now we have three eight-man crews. Our pension contributions are much, much higher. I’m not bringing home near the money that I was back when I came on board with the fire department,” Baker said.

Meyer said last week that health insurance rates also had increased and that some department members were paying $200 more per month than they had been.

Louderman says he is still exploring solutions for the high health insurance costs, but he estimates an improvement will be seen within the next 30 days. 

“If they can drop the insurance (by) half the price they raised it, that’d be another hundred bucks per check for guys, which would be a substantial raise because that’s not a percentage on your salary. That’s a big percentage on your paycheck,” Meyer said this week.

After the contentious Feb. 4 meeting, Louderman directed Jacob Nacke, chief of the Hannibal Police Department, to notify all councilmembers — Scott Haycraft of the 1st Ward, Mike Dobson of the 2nd Ward, Robert Koehn of the 3rd Ward, Charles Phillips of the 4th Ward and Nathan Munger of the 6th Ward — and City Attorney James Lemon of a closed session special meeting on Feb. 6 to discuss potential solutions.

“We looked at the entire budget. We looked at the reserves to see where we could pull from for a short-term,” Louderman said.

The plan was agreed upon by Louderman, Meyer and Hannibal Fire Chief Ryan Neisen during a morning meeting on Feb. 10.

Louderman declined to go into much detail about the contents of the council’s closed session meeting. Meyer said Louderman told him the councilmen voted unanimously in favor of the plan.

As for a long-term solution, all parties involved hope the state legislature will pass HB 866, which would grant Hannibal the authority to enact a public safety sales tax to fund the police and fire departments if its voters approve it in August.

An earlier version of the bill, HB 2290, was introduced by State Rep. Louis Riggs, read a first and a second time, then referred to the local government committee — where it failed to advance before the end of the legislative session.

A fiscal note prepared by the Committee on Legislative Research Oversight Division estimated that if HB 2990 would have successfully passed through the legislature and been approved by voters last year, it would have generated more than $2 million for the fire and police departments in its first full fiscal year (FY 2027). 

Riggs reintroduced the bill as HB 866, which received its first and second reading last month. The bill is not currently on the House calendar, but Louderman hopes it will eventually make its way to the governor’s desk so it can be put on the August ballot.

Even if HB 866 coasts through the legislature and the public safety sales tax gets a majority approval by the citizens of Hannibal in August, the soonest the city would receive additional revenue would be July 1, 2026 (the beginning of FY 2027).

Meyer is optimistic that the salary increases and likelihood of lower health insurance costs will buy the department more time with firefighters considering leaving for better financial opportunities in the area since the current plan is only a short-term fix.

“It’s going to really, really, really depend on whether this public safety tax makes it or not, because if guys see that it doesn’t make it through the Senate … If they were on the fence about leaving, they’re going to leave,” Meyer said.

With the current legislative session scheduled to adjourn May 16 and few options to explore after that, the department’s need for a long-term solution becomes more and more dire each day the bill lags in Jefferson City. 

As the urgency grows, stopping the fire department from bleeding out may come down to how much pressure is applied.