The West Nipissing Fire Service came under budget during 2018.
Figures released by Fire Chief Richard Maranda show the department was under budget by $90,822 on a budget of $2,195,986.
Maranda presented the annual report of the service to council on Tuesday evening.
The report shows the department is run efficiently, especially when it comes to per capita costs.
Maranda says the per capita cost to run the department is $152.88 per household.
He says compared to other similar-sized areas, the cost is small.
For example, in Pembroke, the fire service there has a per capita cost of $267.97.
Renfrew’s per capita cost is $207.64 cents.
Smiths Falls has a per capita cost closer to West Nipissing at $164.29 but the per capita figure for the community of Deep River is $524.68.
Last year saw 74 fire incidents, 20 of which were structure fires that resulted in $725,200 in damage.
Maranda says there were 21 structure fires in 2017 but the damage that year was $1.8 million.
In total, the department fielded 510 total calls last year and of that 271 were emergencies compared to 248 emergency calls in 2017.
Maranda also detailed the various times it took to respond to different fires.
Those times varied from as few as nine minutes to as much as 38 minutes.
Maranda says the range is the result of where the fire is located.
As an example, he pointed out the fire that took 38 minutes to respond to was on East Road, a roadway located some distance from the fire station.
Maranda says the response time to all fires is calculated from the initial call to the department.
He says at that moment, the firefighters are paged, they head to the nearest fire department to pick up their equipment and then drive to the scene.
The department has 102 volunteers and Maranda says there’s a constant drive to keep recruiting more volunteers.
Maranda also told council that the department continues to pursue calls for inspections to help prevent fires and also continues its public education program to reduce the number of fires.
Maranda adds last year the firefighters engaged in 1,740 hours of training.