There was a moment on Tuesday night when Davis Fire Captain Joe Tenney was expressing his frustration that there were people “telling us how the fire department should be run.” He added, “It would be nicer if there was a fire chief who was vested, you know actually committed to being here for five or ten years to actually put together a professional program.”
“We have experts, those who have been doing it for 20, 25, 30 years,” he said. “They are the experts, the experts are those who have been here tonight that are doing it every day. And it doesn’t match up. We can see between the lines of the information that’s been given.”
Later, when City Manager Steve Pinkerton would respond, he noted his objections to the notion that firefighters were not involved in the creation of the report. Indeed, it was Scott Kenley and Shawn Kinney that were instrumental in developing the new staffing model that council ended up adopting.
At the same time, it was clear that Captain Tenney was taking a shot, not just at Mr. Pinkerton, but also at me, as I had spoken just before him to throw out to council the idea of moving the fire station.
Honestly, I don’t need to know anything more than how to read a map to see that if you have boundary drop, the central fire station is located in the wrong place. It sits right on the four-minute travel time boundary for the UC Davis Fire Station, and you can fix the problem of lack of coverage for Wildhorse by simply shifting the Central Fire Station to either Cannery or somewhere along Covell Blvd east of F St.
But, at the same time, I take issue with the notion that the firefighters are the experts and the sole arbiters of how to staff the fire station. My mind flashed away from firefighting and toward baseball. One of my favorite more recent movies is Moneyball.
Moneyball, based on a book by Michael Lewis, tracks Oakland A’S General Manager Billy Beane who, in 2002, recognized that without the money to compete with large market teams like the New York Yankees, he would have to find a different way to evaluate talent.
Utilizing a young math guru, he changed the way we look at baseball statistics. Moneyball opens with a quote from baseball great Mickey Mantle, “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.”
The problem in using the firefighters to determine their staffing arrangements is, of course, they are self-interested and biased.
But several concepts from Moneyball give us significant insight into this situation, without comparing baseball to firefighting.
The first and most obvious point is that the city of Davis is not the New York Yankees in terms of its ability to pay firefighters salary. When I implied we were the Oakland A’s, it was suggested we were closer to the Rivercats.
The lesson here is obvious. The New York Yankees have the capacity to go out and buy players to fill needs. The result is that, since 1996, the Yankees have made the playoffs 16 of 17 years, including five World Championships and two American League Championships.
The question is how you can compete in a market when you are not the New York Yankees, and you have to operate on a fraction of their salary.
We can think of the staffing model in that way – we are trying to innovate in a way to protect the public, but recognizing we must find ways to cut the budget.
The second point is that the experts are not the only gatekeepers to insight into how to judge performance. It was a math and economics major who helped Billy Beane look at baseball in a different way, that revolutionized the way we analyze performance and even how we create strategies.
It does not taking advanced econometrics, however, to look at a map to determine that we have the fire station in the wrong position. It does not take advanced Bayesian Updating techniques to realize that a system predicated on moving personnel around and leaving part of the city exposed is not the optimal staffing arrangement.
Moreover, it seems pretty obvious to me that the traditional method of delivering services is obsolete in a model where two-thirds of your calls are medical calls and less than ten percent are fires. Having a fully-loaded fire engine with four firefighters on it for every single call is, simply put, a waste of resources.
The idea of decoupling the rescue apparatus from the fire engine, and allowing each to serve as stand-alone vehicles was not created by the layman city manager or even this “blogger.” Instead it was Division Chief Shawn Kinney who, along with Chief Scott Kenley, came up with a system that better utilizes the personnel that we have to make the force smaller and flexible.
It doesn’t take a firefighter to be able to look at a map, look at the breakdown of calls for service, and, more importantly, look at the bottom economic line and realize we have to do things a different way because we are not the New York Yankees.
Every single person on Tuesday night acknowledged that it was better to have four on an engine than three. But, then again, every single baseball person would tell you it’s better to be the New York Yankees than the Oakland A’s.
That’s not the question. The question is how we can best provide fire service in the context of multimillion dollar budget deficits. The firefighters are only looking at one variable.
That being said, leaving aside the issue of staffing, you cannot convince me that we have the ideal model for delivering service in Davis. And, frankly, whether we have four or three on an engine, that needed to change.
I could be wrong, but to me it looks like that model was set up to make the case for a fourth fire station. Clearly, that had to be one reason why boundary drop, which has been floated for twenty years, was never implemented.
At the end of the day, we implemented the right changes because they relied both on the expertise of professional firefighters and also the raw analysis of bean counters – to develop a model that makes more sense in a small market town that cannot afford a fourth fire station, with its annual $2 million dollars in average costs.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Noting that four per truck would be better than three isn’t all that insightful. Five or six on a truck would be even better. What’s the point?
How long was it going to take before someone noticed that no place except Davis is running with four and that switching to four as the means to meet the burning building regulations no longer makes sense if it ever did?
Pay no attention to those firefighters behind the curtain who refused to attend planning meetings or otherwise provide input and now are claiming to be the experts to whom we should be listening.
It ain’t rocket science or baseball. It appears to most observers that the study by the interim chief provides better, safer, more effective firefighting and aid call service and does it at lower cost than the present setup.
I notice that the firefighters still haven’t provided their expert advice about how to improve service. One suspects tha they thought this issue just would go away once the “four is better than three” argument was made.
Whether you’re an expert, David, might be questionable. But, you certainly deserve credit for keeping the issue in the forefront for all these years so that council inaction wouldn’t be the final decision.
I’m certainly not claiming to be an expert, it’s a been a learning experience across the board for me.
I realize that; I was referring to Capt. Tenney’s implied criticism about non-expert “experts.” Still, you’ve provided an exceptional public service be keeping this issue (and the related budget and campaign matters) in the public eye for such a long time. It looks as though the council is making progress.
This is a tremendous step forward. More hopefully will occur shortly. Unfortunately it looks like we are headed to impasse, that’s unfortunate as we really need a long term solution and impasse by its nature is only a single year.
It looks like we have hired some quality people as division chiefs and now the last piece that hasn’t been discussed here – but the council committed to on Tuesday – is hiring a good permanent chief to lead the department. Chief Conroy was a real problem during her time, we need strong leadership to move forward.
the firefighters in my view eren’t served well by their leadership. i found captain tenney’s remarks quite banal and patronizing. at no point did the firefighters or their leadership step up with new and better ways to do things. this was all about preserving the stutus quo.
Shawn Kinny should be applauded…I cannot imagine what he has had to endure in his position…..
And the fact that the MOU might go to impasse makes Dan and Lucas’ views to handle this within the contract negotations ring even less clear. In my opinion.
[b]Fallacy of Appeal to Authority[/b]
David, the firefighter union lack facts on their side so their only choice is to engage in fallacious argument. The latest is [i]argumentum ad auctoritatem[/i], the Appeal to Authority. The expert opinion is always correct and cannot be questioned.
[b]Other Firefighter Union Position Fallacies[/b]
The entire fire union position has been as series of logical fallacies and distortions:
[b][i]Fallacy of the False Dichotomy or False Choice:[/i][/b] Either you are with the fire union position or you are against firefighters.
[b][i]Fallacy of the Appeal to Emotion:[/i][/b] Firefighters are heroes. How can you be against the Hero union position?
[b][i]Classic Ad Hominem Attack:[/i][/b] You are listening to this blogger who shouldn’t even be tax exempt?? I am sure David has a list as long as his arm regarding personal attacks from the vaunted fire union…
You can’t expect logical argument from those with no facts in the public safety argument, just pocket lining pay package self interest on their side.
Big praise to the comparatively under paid UCD fire department, their use of student volunteers, Police Cheif Black, Chief Scott Kenley, Captain Kinney and City Manager Pinkerton for taking gutsy positions. The change in city manager leadership has truly been lacking during the Hippler, Antonen, Emelen, Navazio era…
And finally thanks to Brett Lee for taking the lead and the heat from the council Dias. If only the career politician wannabes on the council had such ethical fortitude and spine…
Greenwald, you should go along for a ride sometime with Davis firefighters, if they’d even let you aboard one of their vehicles and see what saving lives and property is all about, before you compare fire fightin to Moneyball?!
I went for a ride along with the Davis Firefighters back in 2007. At this point it wouldn’t be a great idea. But I might go with UC Davis.
The point about moneyball is thinking outside of the box to deliver services with finite resources.
[quote]Noting that four per truck would be better than three isn’t all that insightful. Five or six on a truck would be even better. What’s the point? [/quote]
A common belief is that if a few is good, more must be better. This is demonstrably not true in the area of patient care and transport. An example. In Sacramento, my clinic is located one block from a fire station. We frequently use their ambulance service for transport from the clinic to the hospital. It is not unusual for six fire fighters to arrive in response to our call for a transport. By the time they arrive, the patient is stabilized, oxygen and IV in place, if needed ,and ready to go. The result is six people arriving ready to do the work of two. This is always superfluous, and sometimes distracting and disruptive of other clinic functions.
From my perspective, the number of people arriving to handle a situation should be the number that is necessary to carry out the needed task as efficiently as possible. Six is not necessarily better than two, and four is not necessarily better than three. It is the situation, not necessarily the numbers, that is critical.