Chase to chief: save $1 million
Published Friday June 26th, 2009
City Deputy mayor wants to see benefits from review of the city's fire services
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.
"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.
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Firefighters are trained as medical first responders in Saint John. Were trained in CPR, we carry oxygen on the truck as well as an AED to shock a persons heart.
Because of the strategic locations of the fire stations throughout the city fire is very often the first on scene to a medical emergency. While waiting for the EMTs we can assess the patient (heart rate, blood pressure, respirations, etc) or begin CPR if needed or control bleeding in the case of traumatic injury. Once EMT's are on scene we are also able to lend manpower in order to get the patient on the way to the hospital quicker.
Conversly if the EMT's get on scene first and decide we are not needed they will cancel us on route.
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I wouldn't be comfortable saying that it's standard practice for all departments in North America but I would say a majority of departments do. Moncton and Fredericton do, larger departments like Toronto and Winnipeg also send fire to medical calls.
Your right Sarnia has a 131 firefighters, But they also have Mutual Aid agreements with the city of Port Huron Michigan and the Lambton county Mutual Aid plan which allows them to keep costs down and employ less staff
They respond to the same calls we do. Medicals, ice/water resuce, high angle, confined space etc. They average 3500 call annually versus 9400 calls last year in Saint John.
Sarnia has a total area of 168 sq km versus Saint John's 316 sqkm.
Refineries in Sarnia are required to have full time fire brigades which greatly reduces the amount risk to their fire service.