Fire officials back state cistern fund; insurers warn against funding via policy assessments

Bill Scoble, government affairs director for the Fire Chiefs Association of Massachusetts, told the committee that S.2739 would help communities without municipal water install and maintain underground cisterns for firefighting supply.

"You cannot put out a structure fire without water," Scoble said, and he introduced Chief Gary Daugherty Jr. (Hopkinton) and Chief Christopher Norris (East Hampton) to describe local experience.

Chief Daugherty said Hopkinton operates 26 cisterns and four dry hydrants, most cisterns holding about 30,000 gallons. He said maintenance budgets are small — Hopkinton currently budgets $5,000 annually and that will drop to $2,500 next fiscal year — and that major repairs can quickly exhaust local funds.

Chief Norris told the committee that water supply makes up roughly 40% of a community's ISO public protection classification, which in turn influences property insurance rates. He said emerging fire hazards, including lithium‑ion battery fires and residential energy storage systems, can require far more water — in some descriptions up to tens of thousands of gallons — than traditional incidents.

Chris Stark, executive director of the Mass. Insurance Federation, said he supports the cistern idea but objected to the bill's funding mechanism as written. Stark said assessments and surcharges added to homeowners' insurance policies have grown rapidly: the fire services line item rose from about $31 million in 2021 to $50 million in the most recent budget, and adding additional per‑policy charges would both increase consumer costs and could prompt "retaliatory taxes" across state lines that raise costs further.

"We have to do something to constrain the cost and the rising cost of fire services or return those costs to the general fund," Stark told the committee, urging against using insurance products as perpetual revenue generators.

No formal vote on S.2739 occurred at the hearing. Committee members asked practical questions about cistern maintenance responsibilities, ISO classification impacts and how to prioritize communities lacking hydrants.