Looking at Fire District overhead.

The town currently provides some services to the town's three independent fire districts at no charge. These services are collection of the fire district tax levies and dispatch of the the fire departments by the town's police dispatch operators. The Select Board had previously had discussion about charging the fire districts for these services. Today, the Budget Director presented a proposal for how to assess these charges. The Select Board will meet with the Prudential Committees of the fire districts in the near future to get their input on the proposal.
The specific proposal was to apportion a percentage of the town collector, town accountant, assessor, and other departmental budgets ...

...involved in tax collection based on the percentage of tax receipts collected compared to the total tax collected.
Using this method, Fire Districts 1, 2 and 3 would be charged 1.79%, .72% and 2.27% of the total cost respectively. This is based on the total collection of the general government and fire levies of $42,216,627 and the fire district levies of $756,694, $305,237 and $958,915 for fire district 1,2 and 3 respectively. Adding the budgets for the town departments involved in collecting the fire levy and multiplying by the percentages given above, results in a charge to the fire districts of $31,784, $12,784 and $40,307 for districts 1,2 and 3 respectively. The total assessment including all three fire districts would be $84,875.
I think that these charges are justifiable given the time and effort expended by the town departments in collecting the fire levies.
Also discussed was a proposal to charge the fire districts a portion of the dispatcher costs based on the same percentages as the tax levy calculation. Applying those percentages to the dispatcher costs yields a charge of $10,227 for Fire District 1, $4,114 for Fire District 2, and $12,969 for Fire District 3 given the total dispatch budget of $571,336. It was noted that a charge for dispatch services had been previously discussed based on the number of calls for each fire district. This method turned out to be unwieldy and was abandoned. The above method may be more acceptable to the fire districts and Select Board.
I have been thinking about the charge for dispatch service and I think perhaps we are trying to parcel this out a little too finely with regard to dispatch charges. Since the police and fire departments are usually dispatched together to the calls, I think that the additional cost in providing dispatch service is small.