{"id":253337,"date":"2026-07-27T23:56:06","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T23:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/253337\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T23:56:06","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T23:56:06","slug":"city-council-to-consider-higher-fees-for-false-fire-alarm-calls-reading-area","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/253337\/","title":{"rendered":"City Council to consider higher fees for false fire alarm calls | Reading Area"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>READING, Pa. &#8211; The Reading Fire Department is looking to increase penalties for false alarms.<\/p>\n<p>Fire officials say they&#8217;ve seen an uptick in needless alarm calls, which are calls for alarms set off by things like construction dust, hairspray, and people smoking indoors.<\/p>\n<p>They are asking the City Council to increase the false alarm violation fee to 400-dollars per occurrence.<\/p>\n<p>They say they had 5 calls for needless alarms just last Friday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;For us to be running 2 million, 2.5 million dollars worth of fire apparatus to these calls from something that&#8217;s preventable, it&#8217;s kind of reached an epic level at this point and time, so we decided that there&#8217;s a need to adjust it,\u201d says Reading Fire Marshall Jeremy Searfoss.<\/p>\n<p>Officials say the fee has not been adjusted in nearly 20 years.<\/p>\n<p>The change will be proposed at tonight&#8217;s city council meeting and will be voted on at a later date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. &#8211; The Reading Fire Department is looking to increase penalties for false alarms. Fire officials say&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253338,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[990,108074,108075,13367,7778,74317,539,26790,294,736,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-253337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-city-council","tag-false-alarm","tag-fee-increase","tag-fire-alarm","tag-fire-department","tag-fire-prevention","tag-pa","tag-penalty","tag-public-safety","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}