Wicomico County Legislative Breakfast tackles EMS Hiring, Liquor sales

WICOMICO COUNTY, Md – During a legislative breakfast members of the County Council, city, Board of Education, and Police met with members of the Eastern Shore Delegation to go over priorities.
Top of the list was an item to study why the Fire and EMS services are losing volunteers and staffing and what can be done to retain that talent.

Wicomico County Director of Administration Bunky Luffman says the county wants to partner up with the state to help fund that study and implement recommendations.

“We will do a SWOT study, and we’ll we’ll have a better idea of where we’re at because volunteerism across the state is going down not only for fire and EMS but in your civic organizations, it’s almost like if you pick a civic organization, they’ll tell you they don’t have as many volunteers as they did ten, 20, 30 years ago,” Luffman said.

Also high on the agenda is a potential change to the way liquor is sold in the county, The Council putting together a liquor task force to study the impacts of removing the county’s monopoly on alcohol sales to distributors and allowing businesses to enter the market.

“It looks like there may be some movement toward allowing different entities to not be compelled to buy through the monopoly,
So they would go and they’d be able to buy through the monopoly, or maybe they would buy from the private sector,” Luffman said adding that he believes that proposal could lead to a revenue drop depending on the amount of sales that would be diverted away from the counties liquor board.

The council is also looking to partner with the state to help promote more tourism as well as state funds and grants to help improve the West Metro Core Park project.