2023.02.21 Packet - FD Staffing Workshop

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continued to increase and have reached a point where it is no longer sustainable for part time employees to manage. The emergency services are the most demanding of volunteer activities today. The physical and time demands associated with training; responding to incidents; maintaining facilities, apparatus, and equipment are grueling if not managed properly. In today’s hectic world, strong leadership is required to make the fire department that will attract volunteers. Fire departments can no longer count on the children of current members following in their parent’s footsteps. Nor can they count on a continuous stream of community people eager to donate their time and energy to their local volunteer fire department. Adding to the problem, departments cannot rely on members staying active in the volunteer fire service for long periods of time. The continued increasing difficulty in recruitment and retention of day time available firefighters has put a strain on the day time available staff and the department response has suffered. Therefore the fire department day time staffing needs to grow with the growing community. Staffing Plan The Fire Chief recommends that the department moves forward and hire a full time Fire Chief. This position is needed with the rapidly growing community and the many hours spent on administrative duties to keep the department operating. Routinely the part time chief spends numerous evenings and weekends at the fire station, working on department operations. Trying to manage and run the department while still working 40+ hours per week at a full time job, while also managing family obligations, leaves little time for the chief to spend the needed time and effort to effectively and efficiently manage a department of 25+ people. The fire chief routinely spends numerous hours during their normal job work hours, conducting fire department business. Whether it is responding to emails in a timely fashion, or responding to staff or citizen inquiries. Additionally, the fire chief is unable to work collaboratively with other city staff or area fire departments. With the fire chief unable meet during the day when other staff are working, this limits the collaboration the fire department can have with others. This also limits the fire chief’s ability to effectively and efficiently manage people during the day. Additionally during this time, some salaried and hourly staff will need to remain to manage the administrative work of the department. The duties of 11 different people would certainly overwhelm the daily work of just 1 full time Chief. Therefore even after a full time chief position is filled, the salaries of the Deputy Chief and the Assistant Chief should remain. Even though some of the duties that the Deputy Chief and Assistant Chief are assigned would be completed by the Full time Chief along with the duties of the Fire Marshal, Administrative Captain and Administrative Lieutenant. Duties that the Safety Captain, Training Captain, Safety Lieutenant, Training Lieutenant and Chief Engineer would need to be absorbed, and the Deputy Chief and Assistant Chief would continue to assist the Fire Chief in completion of these duties. There would also be 2 Captains and 2 Lieutenants that would assist when needed with the administrative duties. The Captains and Lieutenants would be paid by the hour for their time spent working on administrative duties. By taking the extra work load off many of the officers and allowing them to respond to emergency calls, training drill, community events, and small amounts of administrative work as needed, is a path to help sustain the paid on call model in the City of Hugo for years to come.