On November 13, 2012, Interim Fire Chief Scott Kenley presented an audit of the Fire Department Operations to the Davis City Council. At the time, the item was informational only. However, Chief Kenley now comes back to council with an action plan on ways that will offer opportunities for cost savings to the city, while still maintaining a high level of service.
The two biggest of these recommendations are dropping the boundary between Davis Fire and UC Davis, which would allow the closest unit to respond to an emergency situation regardless of whether they happened to be a Davis Fire Unit or a UC Davis Fire Unit. The second recommendation is a reduction of the level of service from three four-person staffing units, to a Daily Minimum Staffing of eleven, which would include three firefighters on each engine and two on the rescue apparatus at Station 31.
The report also recommends shifting the response time which is currently set at five minutes – a goal that is met only 42% of the time. The goal is to meet the response time goal 90 percent of the time. The staff report argues that the city has two options here: one would be to increase the number of units or the second would be to “adopt a more realistic and accepted response time goal.”
Staff argues, “Adopting a more realistic (accepted industry norm) response time goal will have no impact on current response times; the current goal is just that, a goal, and is not, in and of itself, reflective of actual response times. However, dropping the boundary between the City and UC Davis will have a positive effect on response times by increasing the number of available resources to respond to emergencies within the city limits of Davis.”
Interim Chief Kenley and City Manager Steve Pinkerton recommend that the council develop “a set of response time goals for fire and non-fire responses that contain a fractal performance measure, a time measure and a stated service level objective.”
Citygate Associates, as the Vanguard has reported a number of times, twice recommended the city move their response time goal from five to seven minutes, believing this was a reasonable goal that also met industry standards.
The longest standing issue with fire service has been the current staffing level of four firefighters on an engine, which has been in place since 1999.
Indeed, the staff report pays homage to the work of the Vanguard on this matter, writing, “Over the past five years, several articles have been written in the Davis Enterprise and a local internet blog, the People’s Vanguard of Davis, concerning the four person staffing model. At the center of the criticism is the cost of the four-person staffing and the fact that a majority of fire agencies throughout the state and nation staff their engines with only three personnel.”
The audit presented four alternatives, ranging from the current staffing of 12 down to 10.
Ultimately, staff recommends not going down to ten, but the more middle-based 11 which allows for three fire engines with three firefighters and two on the rescue apparatus.
Writes city staff, “Even though the first arriving unit in Station 32 and Station 33’s first-in area may only have three personnel assigned, with the addition of Rescue 31 as a stand alone piece of equipment, it could be dispatched in concert with Engine 32 or 33, increasing the on-scene staffing to five instead of the current four.”
Staff notes, at present, “Rescue 31 must respond in tandem with Engine 31 to all calls. By making the Rescue a stand alone unit, the rescue could respond to traffic accidents in Station 32 and 33’s first-in area and leave Engine 31 in quarters to respond to additional calls.”
Chief Kenley and City Manager Pinkerton recommend implementing this staffing model by March 1, 2013. They believe this arrangement will both improve the level of service and save around $360,000 annually. While this falls short of the full savings we had hoped, it marks a reasonable compromise between cost and public safety.
Key to this model is the boundary drop. With the boundary drop, the city would have six available units for response instead of its current three.
The Vanguard covered the issue extensively back in November. Right now, a UC Davis unit cannot be the first responder to an emergency in the city.
Chief Kenley noted at the time, “Currently, Engine Thirty-four is not on the initial call for any emergency calls within the City of Davis’s response boundaries, including simultaneous calls in Engine Thirty-one’s first-in response area.”
“I think you and the rest of the public would be surprised how many times Davis Fire sends E-32 or E-33 to an emergency that E-34 or T-34 is closer to,” said one of our sources, who asked not to be identified, to the Vanguard in November.
In 1993, the City of Davis and the University of Davis agreed to “a shared goal to protect the fire and life safety of the community by reducing cross-organizational barriers that impede achievement of that goal.”
In 2000, Citygate acknowledged that “if the City were able to share resources with the University of Davis Fire Department, the City would achieve better distribution and concentration of resources that would be more equitable for the community.”
Chief Kenley argues, “By expanding the response boundaries for the City of Davis Fire and the University of Davis Fire, the City would realize an increase of two available units to respond to calls.”
He adds, “In addition, the location of the UC Fire Station 34 covers a portion of the Station 31’s first-in area, where approximately fifty percent (50%) of all City of Davis emergency calls occur.”
The Davis Enterprise, in its editorial today, argues that “this is a matter of life and death.”
They write, “The city of Davis and UC Davis need to remove the boundary that prohibits university firefighters from responding first to fire and medical emergencies in the city of Davis, and vice versa. This change should be made immediately.”
They link the timing to the December 4 decision by the Yolo County Board of Supervisors “to withdraw from the Sierra Sacramento-Valley Emergency Medical Services Agency. In the next six months, the county will form a new locally run EMS agency to manage ambulance services.”
That is the one missing link to the discussion in the audit – changing the way we respond to medical calls. However, the compromise allows for a stand-alone medical response unit, which may pave the way for a more realistic and cost-effective use of first response.
Writes the Enterprise editorial: “The hope is that local authorities will better respond to the needs of Yolo County residents. After the change in management, a private contractor will still be the ambulance company. Currently, that is American Medical Response.”
The editorial illustrates the problem with boundary, noting, “While it is true we do not normally have multiple structure fires in Davis in a single day, our three city fire stations are often kept busy responding to medical emergencies. When two or more calls come in one after the other, a danger created by the UCD-city limit boundary arises.”
Here they illustrate the problem, noting a situation that calls for a response from the downtown station to Wildhorse, while another emergency happens on Rice Lane near A Street.
The Enterprise writes, “The Rice Lane patient is 3.1 miles from the West Davis station, about an eight-minute drive. He is 3.3 miles from the South Davis station – nine minutes.
“Due to the current boundary restrictions on first responders, UCD firefighters cannot respond to the Rice Lane patient. Yet Engine 34 on campus is less than a mile away – three minutes. They would not be allowed to respond first even if the Rice Lane house were on fire.”
“The Rice Lane patient might die waiting for a crew from one of our outlying stations to race across town,” they argue.
“Dropping the boundary does not need approval from Davis firefighters. It is not a matter for collective bargaining. Dropping the boundary requires city and UCD leaders to sit down and work this out,” the Enterprise concludes. “The change needs to be made now. It is a matter of life and death.”
The council will take up the issue of a boundary drop, along with that of fire staffing, response time, and finally management oversight, where the city believes “there is a potential for cost savings in both agencies from a consolidation of the management responsibilities” between the City of Davis and the UC Davis fire departments.
“Over the course of eighteen months between late 2010 and early 2012, the agencies shared a fire chief while the departments were assessing the feasibility of merging into one fire department,” staff writes. “In February of this year, the agencies agreed to place that study on hold pending analysis of the differences in the labor contracts. The audit does not propose a full merger of the two departments, however, does see value in the sharing of management oversight.”
The Vanguard, as the staff report noted, has long been asking for changes to the staffing and service model of the fire department. After nearly five years of writing on this subject, the city appears poised to act.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
The discussion emphasizes the benefit to the city of a boundary drop. Are there any significant downsides to the fact that city units would have to respond to calls on campus?
.
Finally. How many millions have we wasted on the two in, two out policy? Rich, any estimates, back to 2000?
The current plan for the water project is similarly an obvious waste of taxpayer money.
[i]”Are there any significant downsides to the fact that city units would have to respond to calls on campus?”[/i]
According to Chief Kenley, no.
The real downside of dropping the boundary has to do with money–that is, money paid to City of Davis firefighters. They make a lot more money than university firefighters. If a lower-paid UCD crew takes a call in the city, that’s a job the City crew does not have. What Local 3494–which adamantly opposes dropping the boundary–would like is to hire more massively overpaid City of Davis firefighters.
Since this was first studied in 1993, everyone has agreed that the boundary is a serious threat to public safety in Davis (and on campus). But we have had for all of that time up to now fire chiefs who bowed down to the union. If you read the Aaronson report (the 2/3rds which is not redacted), you will realize just how much former Fire Chief Rose Conroy was in the palm of Bobby Weist, the fire union’s leader.
This is pretty much the same leadership problem when it comes to rational fire staffing–the union and the fire chiefs who have sucked up to the union have acted against the public interest for their own benefit.
What has changed is that Scott Kenley is not a suck-up to Weist. And Joe Krovoza and Rochelle Swanson got elected without firefighter money and they have led the Council to act in the public’s best interest on this issue.
[i]”How many millions have we wasted on the two in, two out policy?”[/i]
I don’t know the dollar amount. But keep in mind that 2-in, 2-out will remain policy. It is required by OSHA. All fire agencies in California (and elsewhere in the U.S.) which have 3-person crews observe 2-in, 2-out when they are fighting structure fires.
In Davis, when we have, for example, a house fire, we send multiple fire trucks. We also call on nearby agencies (such as UCD) for mutual aid in those situations. And while it is true that if there are only 3 on a truck, 2 men cannot enter to fight the fire* until the second truck arrives, it is not the case that the crew from the first arriving truck immediately makes entry into a burning building to fight a fire. The normal routine is to set-up a lot of equipment and to survey the perimeter of the structure to figure out what is going on and to lay out a plan of attack. In the few minutes those procedures take, the 2nd and 3rd fire trucks will arrive.
One other note with regard to the change in Davis’s staffing: we have 3 city stations–central, west and south. The staffing at the central station will still have a 4-man crew. Chief Kenley told me (and Rochelle and Joe) that was the case even before 2-in, 2-out became the federal standard. Kenley told us that due to the mission of the central station, a 4-man crew there is better for public safety. However, if the council adopts the proposed reforms, the west and south stations will change to 3-man crews. (No one is going to be fired. I am glad to know that. The change will be made with attrition, as people retire.)
*OSHA’s 2-in, 2-out rule does not prohibit firefighters (or cops) from running into a burning building in order to rescue a person. If a crew of 3 arrives and they see that someone is stuck inside a house on fire, 1 or 2 or all 3 can make entry immediately. The 2-in, 2-out restriction applies to making entry in order to douse the flames from inside a burning building.