City Deputy mayor wants to see benefits from review of the city's fire services

C1

John Chilibeck
Telegraph-Journal

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

37 Comment(s)

SAINT JOHN - Deputy Mayor Stephen Chase says he wants the city to save $1 million or more on fire services next year, otherwise a review of the department will have been a waste of time.

1 of 3

Noel Chenier/Telegraph-Journal

Saint John’s $20.3-million fire service eats up a good chunk of the city’s $127-million operational budget.

Rob Simonds

Stephen Chase

"This is probably the biggest operational review the city will undertake," said Chase, referring to the program common council signed off on earlier this week.

"What we need are ideas. It's not too difficult to understand what's being delivered and the cost. But what I'm looking for are innovative ideas on how we can still deliver a good fire service, meeting the needs of this community, but still save some money."

Fire Chief Rob Simonds is in charge of conducting the review, something that concerns Chase. He says Simonds has never shown a willingness to find big savings.

"The chief had every opportunity to do this before and he hasn't," Chase said, mentioning that the fire department's strong union culture makes it difficult for any manager looking at cutbacks. "It would likely be very difficult for him to introduce any ideas that would see any impact on his firefighters."

But Simonds says he understands what council wants and will follow the instructions it gave him.

The chief said in an interview that the review will for the first time outline the exact cost of every service provided by the fire department and how important it is. Once council sees the list, it will be able to decide what should stay or go.

"At no point did (council) say, 'Come back with a recommendation to, say, reduce your budget by x-y-z,' " Simonds said. "What they've asked me to do is identify the options, put a dollar value to them, and tell us what the implications are for each of them from the most significant, to the least significant."

The motion passed by council in May states the review should consider consolidating fire stations, introducing some volunteer firefighters, changing the response policy and reducing medical assistance calls, among other ideas. The politicians also wanted to know how the changes could affect residential insurance rates.

Coun. Gary Sullivan says he wants to see savings in every department, but pointed out that the $20.3-million fire service eats up a significant portion of the $127-million city budget. He said he's willing to wait and see what the findings are before he speculates where savings can be found.

"I don't have that level of expertise to know," he said.

"But the city doesn't have an unlimited chequing account. We need to be prepared to make hard decisions if necessary."

On Monday, council agreed to hire SMC Risk Management Services to conduct part of the review for $40,000. The chief clarified in the interview that the company was hired because council wanted to know how changes to fire service would affect insurance rates. He said the company wasn't hired because management at the fire department was too tied up with other work. SMC owns the proprietary rights to the data it uses for its insurance advice.

"This component, this pillar of the study, can only be done by the insurance industry themselves," Simonds said."They can quantitatively measure what we need, measure what we have and say, 'You know what, you have way too much fire protection for what you need' or conversely, 'You have too little.' At least what you have is a baseline assessment that's going to allow council to make informed decisions."

Staff at the fire department has been busy doing natural gas pipeline and LNG training in preparation for the big industrial project that's coming online at Mispec. That's why Simonds asked council to push the review's completion date from August to the end of September.

A steering committee, made up of one councillor from each of the four wards, will soon be in place to guide the fire chief in the review. The nominating committee - made up of the deputy mayor, Mayor Ivan Court and Councillor Joe Mott - is expected to meet Monday morning to consider appointments.

"They can provide me greater focus because we're talking about delivering this thing in roughly 90 to 100 days," Simonds said of the steering committee.