welcome to spotlight on maplewood i'm your host city manager management the purpose of spotlight is to inform a port area residents of the programs and services available to them and to explore issues and subjects that are of interest to our citizens today spotlight will focus on our fire department we're pleased to have where this fire chief steve look and welcome steve thank you it's a pleasure being here i know firefighters have a tough job you feel the citizens of maplewood really appreciate the fire department and the job that you guys are doing this as budget as a should you know absolutely we get a lot of calls from our residents praising us and thanking us you have to remember too we're a dual combination department we both have a mess as well as the fire side of it so we interact with our customers well over thirty eight hundred almost four thousand times a year and we're very very excited to hear from them when they have praises for us we're also excited to hear from them when they have words of wisdom or if something didn't go quite the way they wanted to do so we're very thankful for our customers and i know they appreciate assume and sleep i can second that but the purpose of today's spotlight is it is really time to to spotlight what changes are going to be taking place in the fire department two thousand and eleven now these are some really major changes that our fire department has experience in probably for maybe twenty years or more and so let's  begin to explain some of these changes and and we can refer to the powerpoint presentation as as appropriate but steve tell us what other changes are going to be taking place let me let me do a little background real quick i think so my people don't understand or don't even probably remember that the fire service in the city of maplewood started almost seventy years ago and it started with three independent fire departments first there was the gladstone fire department and then these these county line fire department started in the parkside fire department started it's time evolved with those three departments the gladstone department at one time only had one station in gladstone they needed an open another one in the northern end of their district which is now up by the maplewood mall which is have been there for almost thirty years and he's come the line needed a second station and so the one that they originally had on stillwater they needed to open another one which is the one located down on the end of the lane and you have to remember most of those stations have been there well over thirty years and some of them have been there almost a full seventy years as everything is changed the trends have changed in the type of calls of change in the location of our people have changed in the city is now grown i think can you maybe can correct me but i think as far as residential we're at that ninety eight ninety nine percent build as far as any residential can go so the city is pretty set so we needed to look at ways that we are going to be able to take us into the future in one of them were some of the trends and if i can go to the power point for a minute let me just point out a couple of them to  you we used to be and we still are a paid per call department but we're a combination department we have full time firefighters and we have are paid per call firefighters today to recruit paper call firefighters is getting ever more difficult and yet we still need those bodies to be there and  to have them there when we have the call volumes that we do and the number of calls in any given time so we had two firefighters from each of the five stations they're paid per call firefighters two of our full time firefighters and we got together we said we need to look at what's going to take us in the next year two years ten years and even fifty years out and so we needed to look at a different staffing program to where we could make sure we had more people on duty at any given time simply due to the increase in call volume that we have we need  adequate we trained personnel to be able to provide a high level of sustainable service to the community that was one of the things that's getting more and more difficult since nine eleven the fire service as well as the police departments have had so many things added to their plate that in order to train it's just taking countless hours and to try to be good in everything that we do is becoming more and more difficult so we need to continue to add training to it the difficulty in recruiting and retaining paid for call fire personnel one of the things that's really interesting ten years ago we had over fifty percent of our department had probably fifteen to thirty years on to date we don't have that any longer though they have retired off today thirty two of our firefighters are sixty current firefighters thirty two of them have less than five years on the department so it's becoming more and more difficult to get our people trained to get them to states many of our new recruits that we get today are younger folks they still live at home they're trying to go to school full time they're trying to manage  and then whatever career they get into may take a while a lot of the area that we have and also the aging of our city is another big reason why we're having more and more trouble and didn't the kind of the culture change where people used to live and work in the community and were available particularly during the daylight hours to answer for calls and that's sort of changed where people could be working anywhere and all over the metro area and so the number of firefighters available for daylight calls is really down in comparison to say the nighttime oh absolutely i mean you have to go back and you don't have to go back very far you know maybe five to eight years ago they used to be a third shift and even maybe ten years ago you had a first strip shift  second shift in the midnight shift which was the third shift and so many of our daytime firefighters work those search shifts you don't have that today and in many cases you don't even have the second shift any longer doing any private business private businesses to where our folks could work a night shift be available for calls during the day and we just don't have the any longer and that is been one of the big challenges the other thing is the challenge in the de make up of a family today usually today both the husband and the way fork they have children both of them are busy in their jobs that they do and it may take them out of the area traveling or whatever and then they get home at night and they want to spend time with the kids and i call them away five or six times to take calls it becomes very difficult or the other side of the coin to it is that they want to be actively involved in sports as the kids get older so then you run into the problem with well i want to be a coach and i want to do things more for my children so there's many more dynamics today taking time away from a family than there was say fifteen twenty or even thirty years ago or thirty four years ago when i joined a department that we have today and that's one of the major reasons this is changing well i think also too that as most maplewood citizens are aware that our fire department operates emergency medical services to which i think is probably there are fewer city operated emergency medical services than say private ones such as are healthy used or whatever but are full time firefighters e m t paramedics operate  the ambulance service twenty four hours a day here in maplewood yeah that is correct we actually provide the full service of v m s service within the city you may put including all the transports on a nine one one basis and yes i mean thirty two to thirty three hundred of our almost four thousand calls a year are medically related calls you divide that out over the number of days in a year and it's substantial in any given day we can some days we've answered up to twenty calls but on an average day it's anywhere between thirteen to fourteen calls that we average and that puts a huge burden on those paid to call firefighters and you know i got to tell you steve you know i've been a city manager for over thirty years and have had paid party parchments ambulances in my last two know i'd have ten to one compliments to complaints but since i haven't received any complaints it could be one hundred to one and you know i think that's a real credit to our staff and also to the paramedics and firefighters that provide twenty four hours service to our citizens you know that's something i'm very proud of his well is that our dedication of both our paid recall firefighters and our full time staff are excellent they're there to do their job there they're there to provide that service in the best way possible and go home after and i am so proud of the job that they do the techniques that they learned their willingness to participate is is just outstanding the unfortunate thing about it is the time requirements that it's taking that's making us go to this type of a program and for some of our paper call firefighters they're excited about it because they can plan their day and really what the new program is is that we will only be staffing three fire stations into the future and those stations then will have full time staff along with their paid per call staffed twenty four hours twenty four seven coverage wrecked what our goal is is that we're going to put four paid per call fire if personnel will be working along with our full time staff and what our plan is is that we will instead of today we staffed two stations with our full time staff will staff three stations and help augment that with our paid per call staff but you actually improve service exactly and so what it will do is it will give us more people that can respond immediately from the station in a twenty four hour period then we have now when people have to get up in the evening or get in get in and drive to the station which take an average of two to four minutes we get enough people available and then take the engine or the ambulance out to the call so we're going to have three station staff with more people to go immediately when the call comes in other one will be the gladstone the one that we built back in two thousand that will be one of them that will be active that we will have and then the other one will be the one in the east county line the one on century avenue now in saying that we also need to make some changes to the stations station one is that right now the where it's located will have to be shifted more to the south because we will no longer be using the station for station that's located on the london lane over the period of time until we get to new one built and that one then we need to locate and that will take care of the majority of the call volume in that southern leg the gladstone station will have to add a little bit on to it and again this is for the long term we're not talking you know the fifty years out that we for see this and we need to plan for and they will need to have majority of our call volume i mean the vast majority probably well over two thousand of the calls is right through that highway sixty one to white bear avenue from larpent or until two six ninety four that mean corridor never takes up the largest majority of our calls and so then we can go down that southern leg with the station that's more centrally located let me get this straight because you know there's changes but there's going to be further changes made in precipitation of the further changes that are not a result of the changes you're making now in that these buildings that are reaching the end of most of these buildings are reaching the end of their useful life is that correct absolutely i mean you go back to the east county line the one on century and it's in some very very severe shape that we have over the last ten years or so fifteen years we've been kind of piecemealing them together trying to make them work and to work to a point now where there invest some very terrible shape the heating bills because of the old furnace is the lack of insulation is just gutting to the point that there are the new it's two stations that we are that the two other stations that we have other than the one we built in two thousand which is the main station where our offices are at those are almost all thirty years old as well so the the youngest station we have which is levon years old and then it goes from there almost all the way up to well over almost fifty years so even without the staffing changes you're going to be looking at replacing stage after one way or another so as i understand the plan is to go to your new staff in the post to provide better staffing and response time and to further is to relocate these two of the stations to be a little bit more  centralized or decentralized to provide for the southlake and also to respond to the main corridor calls or more most of most of the calls come in yeah absolutely and you are exactly correct on that these changes aren't necessarily going to really improve response times in some area cases they will but for the most part we are our whole goal was to keep the response time the same but it's really going to add to us as it's going to give us something that's go be sustainable into the future that the stations are going to be located in the right places they're going to be available so that we can add to him if necessary we're going to have the equipment in the right locations for like you'd mentioned we're call volume is in that central corridor  well as position i'm in such a way that when we have driven draw a circle around the stations we have today and we're positioning them within that six to nine minute time response which is kind of what we average today we will have to be able to hit any one of our areas within the city limits out of the location of where we're putting six to nine minutes that's for your fire response correct fire any a mass in most cases we average right around four and a half to five minutes but we say is that in any given time during the day we can easily go to a nine and ten and sometimes even a fifteen minute response if we have multiple calls going on which happen quite often both of our ambulances are tied up we have to call the paper call they have to get to the station we have to find another medic to come in and so we're doing some things to improve that as well as you go from two to three that is correct so now we're in we're going to have an additional crew on the twenty four hour period to pick up that third call and it's not until the fourth call that we may have a little bit of a time lag you know getting to some of our patients so it's going to improve the actual service time is the way we have it planned hopefully to the majority of our service nine no you know we're going to plan on selling the existing stations to help pay for the new stations but that's not going to cover the whole amount so how much are we talking about for the whole plan to be implemented yet we're thinking right now about ten million dollars will cover what we need to do ten to ten point five million dollars and again it's an estimate we're doing a lot of his can be based there are a bunch of grant programs out there that we're seriously going to be looking at actually just started up by fema now through the fire service to where you can get grant money to build fire stations it's one of the newest thing because we're not the only one facing this situation a lot of your major cities are running into the same scenario with old buildings that are in need of some really severe work we're doing that we're going to be looking at popley possibly doing some levee along with that in the course t lot of the buildings as well will be a part of that to take us into the future you know obviously who can't budget ten million dollars so we're probably going to have to go for a bond direct and that will be have to be approved by the voters and so you know this is going to be a start of a long conversation between our fire service and the voters in the city council what's our plan to get this information out to the public and to engage them in the conversation so that we get the benefit of not only your ideas but also about the general public's ideas well one of the things i'd like to point out too about the transparency this is something that really started from the firefighters coming to the top on the joint did start from  first rate and started and started to move to the top and what we needed to do many of them have been for saying for years you know i just it's becoming more and more difficult how we're responding with the number of calls is there any way we can go to some other options and then of course with the reduction in the number of personnel stationed for for instance at one time in twenty firefighters we're down to five firefighters now these are the software is that southlake on london legs and to recruit them and retain them has just been very very difficult so some of that has been driving that as well in the same way in station three think we're at ten firefighters there now so that has been all put together but it came from them they are actually residents of the city you meet with these firefighters that we brought from the stations who provide it so this has been open we've talked about it in it and we've been working on  oh absolutely and we wanted to get all of our ducks in a row we were looking for all of our data we got a lot of census data and everything we could pull together in this group looked at it there were a lot of subcommittees that were put together so that we really feel comfortable that we have what we think will take us into the future and again if i had that crystal ball i'd feel much more comfortable but we really believe that this is the best method that will take us forward as as we look at it the other plan that we have is that in january i believe it's the nineteenth of january and it'll be in the next january monthly city motion a newsletter we're going to have an open house at station three starts at six thirty we're going to a short presentation people can come over ask questions or we also will have and they're there more than welcome to call us at any time or e mail us if they have any questions ahead of time we'd be happy to answer them for and then the following day which will be the thursday which is the twentieth we will be having the exact same type of thing down in the station four area and so i really want to impress upon our residents that this isn't really going to change the service level because in a sense we've been doing this for almost a year and a half pretty close to two years now because our full time staff have been taking the majority of the calls for seventeen hours of the day out of the two stations we currently have which is station to station one and so we're actually going to be adding more people to be on in a twenty four hour period using our paid per call staff instead of waiting for the pager to go off and bring them in will actually be scheduling their time to be at the station and this is going to be a real plus force and the other side of it i think is going to be overtime it's going to be a cost savings and it's going to help us to be sustainable in our budget as we move forward you know five fire stations you've got trucks you have ambulances in each of these stations and they're not cheap to run and operate and when you cost you half a million dollars to buy a fire truck today that's a pretty big chunk of money i know you've told me that you're going to be able to implement this change within your existing budget for two thousand and eleven and i've told you i said i don't think we're going to be able to do it but to go ahead and try it because you know really we don't have much choice i mean we want to provide the service but it  paramedics to come in to take a shift in maplewood and provide that service and again that at the behest of our maplewood fur fighters that they're requesting this prayer absolutely and that is one of the things too that we talked about what was it going to take to be sustainable the unique thing and the nice thing about this program is two is going to shift is that currently you need to live within so many minutes of a station to be there and now you won't have to do that so we can spread that ring out a little bit farther because you will be signing up to work x amount of hours in a quarter or in a month and so we know you will be there for that time so we can go to the farther out of our community and not have that that that day you guess you could say that that tie that's been around her neck about having so many minutes to get to the station because they needed to have a good response time so that's been eliminated and now we have the opportunity and you're exactly right to look for others as we need them right now i think as as our staff is there were we're going to be fine but as people leave and we need to do more we can look outside of that ring and it's going to do two things one it's i think it's truly believe we're going to be able to get already trained personnel people who are already in the position who want to do a side job or do something extra i think is going to be excellent portion of this and also i think we're going to be able to pick up that the younger people out there who want to still be in a part of the profession what kind of surprised me is you know i was you know you guys invited me to the retirees party this fall i think it was and the you know i had a chance to talk to the retired firefighters and and you know to a man they seem to be very very supportive of this plan and you would think that that you know retired folks would say well this is the way we always did it this way it should be in the in the future and that's not the case what i'm hearing from our retired firefighters who actually had a special thing we did we made a power point presentation to them as well so that they had a heads up on what we were thinking and i had many of them come up to me afterwards as well and say you know it we knew certain things were going to have to happen over time the community's getting older i mean we don't have the a lot of influx of new young and again like i mentioned their lives are so tied up between their work and their children in their in their they're just their daily work lives that is becoming more and more difficult and yes i mean they realize that they've seen the progression over the years and it's just one of those things now any time you you eliminate a station in a neighborhood you always have that oh my goodness you know how is that going to affect me and you know you go back to one hundred years ago where the fire stations were the focal point of the community and over time that has really changed dramatically but i truly believe that the program that we're going to do will actually  improve what we have to offer to our road and it's going to be over a period of time so it's just like you know january thirty first station such and such you're going to be closed will still have the stations there they'll still have a truck and i'm just going to be sort of or what's the word not furloughed but in reserve to our existing three stations that will be operating out of three stations and keeping those two in reserve until we know for sure everything is is working out the way you have projected that's exactly right we're not shutting them down overnight as we start this program we're going to keep one truck in each station that we're going to do and we're still planning on is that when we get a major structure fire within the city will be using more of our neighboring departments auto aid to help us out but we'll also be calling back or paid for call firefighters or their new title will be part time firefighters will be calling them in and they'll live in that area they will respond to that station and still take the truck and once we get to a point where we have all the new stations in place and everything at that point time then we will eliminate those at some point in get ready to sell those off now get into were you know to try and save some money we're going to lower the temperatures in the buildings and you know we won't be doing as much in them at all but for the most part yes so as we start this new program we're hoping to kick it off march first as the new program starts we're just not going to tear those bill dongs one question is are you available to come and speak to the local lions club on the program or the the altar society or or whatever groups we have around here and you know i'm sure that there's going to be some residents in the south plague that are going to be very concerned on that and  that you are available to speak to the groups to take their questions as well as solicit dition advice to go absolutely and that's why we think it's really important to have those two open houses to give them an opportunity to come in because as we all know you know miss rumors will get out there as well people have a misconception of what it is we're going to do and we want to take that away from me and i can't stress enough that these changes have actually been in some of them have been operating for a year and a half already and i don't think anybody seen any change anything major difference in them and so we're just taking it to the next level and we want to be there to take away any fears that they may have to let him know we're still there to provide the best possible service we can the unfortunate thing about it is that many of these changes are taking place in a sense are being forced on and just due to lack of the paper called bodies and were able to get today to help us reinforce that out of each of those five stations i'm hopeful that this program in the end in the open houses we have been perhaps march to have a full time fire department it's steve lukens wish to have an effective and timely fire department right absolutely and then again to i mean we we have been talking a just for well over a year all over paid per call firefighters been involved we've been providing them with the information and after a lot of our quality improvement committee meetings we've been providing that information out to them and again like i've mentioned you know it's just been a progression on how we provide the information out we gave it to the retirees are ready we've now provided it to the city council to do it and now we're going to go out and provided to those areas in the community where they of the where the two stations are at some point will will will be gone and that is really our whole focus out there is is to number one is to me assure everyone that the service level to the best of our ability is not going to change i'm not telling him it's going to improve one hundred percent but what we're really do but we needed to look at how were we going to at least maintain that service level going now and into the future and it may change even in the next five years but we think this is a good start one issue to spend the last minute or so little recruitment for people in maplewood or maybe in modern media or whomever is watching this program on channel sixteen that we are actively recruiting volunteers and now this will be paid per shift volunteers what we're changing all of our paper call folks to part time casual employees so you become an employee of the city you'll be paid an hourly wage and so you won't have that paid per call you won't have the pager any longer to do that so as we move forward here shortly we'll see how many if we have some folks who decide to retire or some folks who just feel that this program isn't going to work for me as we make the change and we understood that and we kind of did a rough test earlier to see how many we lose and we understand where some but i think most of them will stay and give it a shot other communities who have done something like this similar their employees after the fact we're very happy about it so as we get to that point then we'll go through a regular hiring process to where we'll do interviews and bring you know how to get on our web site in the website that we've had in the end in the past if we need enough folks will actually do ads in the paper but yes we will be some point after the first  accepting applications and putting that place that's great well i see our time is just about up so thanks for visiting with us steve and thanks to our department and your service to the people of maplewood that's all for spotlight on thanks for watching i'm jim manton city manager maplewood see you next month