Six months into 2026, the all-volunteer Marcellus Fire Department has spent $81,518 of its $274,634 annual budget, and President David Card is asking the town board for fifteen years of tax history before the two sides settle a truck replacement plan and next year’s contract.
The Marcellus Volunteer Fire Department, Inc. closed the first half of 2026 having spent less than a third of what it budgeted for the year, according to a financial statement the department filed with the Town of Marcellus on July 1. The half-year numbers, covering January 1 through June 30, show $81,518 spent against a $274,634 budget, leaving $193,116 unspent at the exact midpoint of the year.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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That is not evidence of a department coasting. It is the opening data point in a budget negotiation that has taken over the Marcellus Town Board’s agenda for two straight meetings, with a third round already scheduled for August 5, and that centers on a decision Card wants the board to make with the benefit of numbers going back a decade and a half.
The math behind the underspending breaks down unevenly across the department’s three budget groups. Administration spent $19,300 of $77,634 budgeted, 24.9 percent. Building costs, covering cleaning, utilities, repairs and supplies for the firehouse at 4242 Slate Hill Road, ran $37,935 against a $67,000 budget, 56.6 percent, the highest usage rate of the three. Operations, the largest single category at $130,000 budgeted, had spent only $24,283, 18.7 percent, by June 30.
Six specific line items show zero spending at all through the halfway mark: Legal and Accounting, budgeted at $15,000; the Chief’s Car fund, budgeted at $12,000; Fire and EMS Training, budgeted at $6,000; Fire Protection, budgeted at $3,000; Response Supplies, budgeted at $2,000; and EMS Supplies, budgeted at $4,000. Combined, those six lines account for $42,000 of the department’s annual budget with nothing drawn against them yet.
Run the pace out and the gap looks even larger than the raw underspend suggests. If the department were spending on an even schedule across twelve months, it would have used half its $274,634 budget, or $137,317, by June 30. Instead it spent $81,518, which works out to 59.4 percent of the pace it would need to hit in order to use the full budget by December 31. That does not necessarily mean money sits unused all year. Building and equipment costs tend to bunch up later in the year, and the department’s own report shows Building spending already running ahead of the other two categories at 56.6 percent of budget. But it does mean that whatever the town board decides about next year’s tax rate, it will be deciding it before this year’s actual spending pattern is fully known.
The department did spend money in June. A separate expense report attached to the same filing shows $18,288.82 paid out to seventeen vendors for the month. The single largest payment, $5,685.15, went to NYSMEC. J&B Installations, Inc. received $4,800.00. Har-Rob Fire Apparatus, the department’s truck vendor, was paid $2,511.00. The Onondaga County Department of Transportation billed the department $657.94. Smaller June payments went to Lewis Uniform Co., LLC ($764.66), Stanley Steemer ($525.00), United Radio ($355.95), Spectrum Enterprise ($243.66), SpectraSite ($238.82), BPAS ($404.00), Colden Enterprises ($616.20), JAN PRO ($655.60), Ascenzi and Corbis, the department’s Quickbooks provider ($100.00), Aplos Software ($49.50) and Morgan Rubbish Removal, Inc. ($6.34).
The number drawing the most attention at Town Hall, though, is not on the expense side. As of July 1, 2026, the department’s Truck Reserve account held $597,998, of which $374,100 sits in a certificate of deposit or money market account. That single reserve fund holds more than four times the combined balance of the department’s other three accounts: a Building Reserve of $21,782, a Capital Reserve of $10,000 and a Contract Checking balance of $105,458, which together total $137,240.
That truck fund is the backdrop for the equipment and apparatus replacement program that Card put on the agenda for the July 15 workshop meeting, a session the town board set aside entirely for fire department business. In a letter to the board signed ahead of that meeting, Card listed six discussion items: the status of workers’ compensation insurance, the difference between town and village parcel coverage split between the Marcellus Area Volunteer Emergency Squad, known as MAVES, and the fire department, the equipment and apparatus replacement program including how many trucks need replacing and on what timeframe, the tax rate that funds the department, contractual budget talks, and the dollar amount to be set aside in the equipment and apparatus fund going forward.
The letter closes with the specific request driving this story: “The Marcellus Fire Department requests tax rates and budget numbers for the past 15 years from the Town of Marcellus.”
Card had already flagged the issue two weeks earlier. Minutes from the July 1 regular town board meeting show he submitted the department’s financials that night and asked board members if they had any questions ahead of the next session. According to the minutes, “the Town Board had no questions at the time of the meeting.”
By the time the workshop convened on July 15, the room had filled out. Present alongside Supervisor Jane Attley, Deputy Supervisor Karen Pollard and Councilors Jeff Berwald, Percy Clarke and Terry Hoey were Card and two other fire department members, Bobby Mayers and Joel McNally, along with Town Historian Linda Wilcox, Highway Superintendent Mike Ossit, Park and Recreation Director Don MacLachlan, and Village of Marcellus Mayor Chad Clarke. The meeting record for that session lists the agenda items discussed but does not show a vote or a dollar figure attached to any of them, meaning the tax rate, the truck timeline and the size of the equipment fund all remained open questions when the meeting adjourned.
Those questions are not going away. The agenda for the town board’s August 5, 2026 meeting lists “Fire Department” again under Discussion Agenda, the same slot the topic occupied on July 1 before it graduated to its own workshop. The August 5 meeting also included a public hearing on consolidating the town’s individual sewer districts into a single joint district, a resolution formally ending Marcellus’s moratorium on residential battery energy storage systems, and a vote on a Harriet Tubman Byway resolution, but the fire department’s tax rate and equipment fund questions were not resolved by any single vote captured in the materials the town has posted.
There is a second, larger pool of fire money that helps explain why the tax rate question matters to more than just the volunteers filling out expense reports. The Town of Marcellus maintains its own Fire District fund, the special taxing district that collects property taxes from residents and pays the department under contract for fire protection. That fund is separate from the Marcellus Volunteer Fire Department, Inc.’s own bank accounts covered in the half-year financial statement. According to the town’s Activities Report presented at the July 1 board meeting, covering fiscal year 2026 period 6 through June 25, the Fire District fund had collected $447,560.99 in revenue against $307,370.25 in expenses, a gap of $140,190.74. It is the rate that generates that revenue, set annually by the town board, that Card is asking the board to trace back fifteen years before the two sides negotiate what comes next.
The department itself predates the town’s current budget process by well over a century. Marcellus Volunteer Fire Department, Inc. was established September 10, 1884, making it 142 years old in 2026. It operates out of a firehouse on Slate Hill Road under Chief of Fire Patrick S. Rothery and President David R. Card. Elsewhere in town business this summer, the department’s civic footprint was visible in smaller ways too: the July 1 meeting minutes note that Parks and Recreation staff thanked Councilor Berwald for organizing a CPR and AED session, and record a water night at Marcellus Park as “a big success.”
The town board’s own emergency equipment spending this summer offers a point of comparison. At the July 1 meeting, board members approved $7,694.70 to replace three aging AED units, one at Town Hall and two at Marcellus Park, with LIFEPAK 1000 units from Stryker, the same brand used by MAVES and the fire department. The pads on the existing units, which are eight years old, had already expired, and the batteries were close behind. The board waived its usual competitive procurement policy for that purchase, citing a single source recommendation from a MAVES representative. At that same July 1 meeting, the board also awarded a $3,808 contract to D. Norris Construction for the concrete pad beneath the new amphitheater and pavilion at Marcellus Park, the lowest of three bids submitted, ahead of quotes of $4,200 from Small Town Earth Works, LLC and $4,998 from Homeworx Construction. Both purchases moved through the board in a single meeting. The fire department’s tax rate and truck timeline, by contrast, have now spanned three meetings without a resolution.
No dollar figure for a new truck, no revised tax rate and no size for the equipment and apparatus fund had been set as of the documents reviewed for this story. The town’s next scheduled workshop meeting is August 19, 2026, followed by a regular town board meeting September 2, 2026, both at 6:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 22 East Main Street. Whether the fifteen years of tax data Card requested makes it onto either agenda, and whether it changes the pace at which the town sets next year’s fire district rate, will show up first in the meeting minutes the town clerk posts after each session.
Sources and verification
This story is built from three primary documents posted by the Town of Marcellus. The first is the packet for the July 15, 2026 workshop meeting, which contains the Marcellus Volunteer Fire Department’s letter to the town board requesting fifteen years of tax and budget data, the department’s Financial Statement of Expenses for January 1 through June 30, 2026, its Expense by Payee report for June 2026, and its reserve and checking account balances as of July 1, 2026. The second is the packet for the August 5, 2026 town board meeting, which includes that meeting’s agenda and the minutes of the July 1, 2026 regular meeting and July 15, 2026 workshop, covering the Fire District Activities Report, the AED replacement vote, the Marcellus Park amphitheater concrete pad bid award, and the sewer district consolidation resolution. The third is the Town of Marcellus’s public Town Board Minutes and Agendas page, used to confirm meeting dates and posting locations. All dollar figures, vendor names and quoted language in this article are taken verbatim from those filings.
