At its June 21 meeting, the Tomball city council approved an amendment to its emergency services ordinance that will result in fines for residents and businesses that excessively have false alarms.

Both the Tomball Police Department and Tomball Fire Department worked to formulate the plan that they hope will curb what they say is becoming an increasing problem with false alarms in the city.

Fire Chief Randy Parr and Police Chief Rob Hauck explained to the council that responding to false alarms costs the department, and in turn the city, valuable money and man hours.

Each department provided to council an analysis for at least the past four years of the number of false alarms they have responded to.

Since 2006, the Tomball Fire Department has responded to 802 false alarms, with the number increasing each year to a record 212 in 2009. Of the false alarm responses last year, 134 were responses to the same address.

Those false alarms, according to the report, cost the city $4,425.

Meanwhile, in an analysis performed by the Tomball Police Department on service calls between January 2005 and December 2009, officers responded to 6,787 alarm calls from citizens and businesses, of which a staggering 98.8 percent “were false or human errors,” the report stated.

“False activation of business or residence alarms, whether burglary or fire, has continued to be a problem for the Tomball Police Department, as well as the Tomball Fire Department,” Tomball Police Capt. Rick Grassi stated in his report to Hauck.

The new law focuses on habitual violators, rather than one-off instances.

Both residents and businesses will not be fined for the first three false alarms set in a 12-month span. However, subsequent false alarms will result in a fine.

For residence, each response by emergency services personnel “after the third through the fifth” will result in a $25 fine; after the fifth through the eighth, a $50 fine; and for each response after the eighth, a $100 charge.

For commercial alarms, for the fourth and fifth responses, a $50 fee will be assessed; for the sixth through eighth, a $75 fine will result; and for responses after the eighth, businesses will be fined $100.

A report provided to council by Parr and Hauck states that “there are costs associated with responding to every call, including those that are generated by an automatic sensing device. Staffing costs and vehicle costs are the two most significant of these costs.”

The measure narrowly passed, 3-2, with councilmen David Quinn, Derek Townsend and Rick Brown all in favor of the plan.

Mark Stoll and Warren Driver both voted against the change.

“I don’t feel as though a fee should be assessed as per this agreement,” Stoll said. “Only on gross violators.”

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