Latest / B Shifter / Consolidation of Fire Services

Transcript

Consolidation of Fire Services · B Shifter

• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to B-Shifter Today, nick Brunassini and myself hanging out with Greg Tominski.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Greg is one of our lead instructors for Blue Card.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: Been on since probably near the beginning, right, greg?
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, probably started in 2011.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: All right, so toward the beginning, and you're currently the fire chief in Star Middleton, correct Middleton, star Idaho, idaho.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: In the Treasure Valley.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: In the Treasure Valley.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: So what we wanted to talk about today was bringing departments together.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, we have a trend in my state, for whatever reason, that people are creating new departments, and it seems like in 2023 should be a time that we try to get some consolidation, stop duplication of efforts and those kind of things which some states are doing very well, and I know you have up in Star Middleton.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: So let's talk about that a little bit.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: How did that relationship come about and how can we help the people who are listening to B-Shifter now to bring those relationships together and explore whether or not consolidation is right for their departments?
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: And then, on the back end, I want to talk a little bit about melding those cultures together.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: But let's start at the beginning.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: How did you get together with your new people?
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Well, I started in Star as a fire chief in 2013 and seven miles down the road is Middleton, and the fire chief there at the time talked about we should do more stuff together, we should maybe even merge the organizations together, and like, yeah, yeah, we should.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: And we just kept on continuing that conversation.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: You know when things happen and people leave organizations and so on and so forth and it was actually the board of Middleton that asked me if I'd be interested in like pursuing that, and they were without a fire chief at that time and wanted to know if we could do it together.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: So, part of that planning and getting together, how similar were your departments Like?
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: Were they both career departments?
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: How are they staffed?
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Was there some things that synergistically made sense?
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Besides just being seven miles apart on the same highway, star had 12 employees, 12 firefighters, me as fire chief, and Middleton had nine firefighters, a few part timers and deputy chief.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: That was kind of run the operations at the time and we were, we just started putting things together.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: I told the board of the Middleton fire district that I couldn't really do anything until I had somebody else in place in operations, because you take two people, one in Middleton and one is the deputy chief in Middleton and the fire chief in Star, and then you just put everything together.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: It was, it was overwhelming.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: We just didn't have enough people in place.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: So a few years, a couple years later, star was able to get deputy chief of operations.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: So once that position was in place, I went back to them and said you know, I think we can start doing something now and we started with just putting the administration together.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: So it was myself, chief Eastloss, chief Sparks and a district administrator, robin.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: We started putting those things together and operating together.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: And then the firefighters wanted more.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: They wanted us to be able to merge.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: As you mentioned earlier, the cultures together merge things together.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Our operations weren't terribly different because we, our demographics, are pretty much the same.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: We have a small town, we have a lot of land, we have a lot of BLM land, so we operated very similar.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: So we just started doing that, started putting the pieces together, and it's a slow process.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: It's not something that I would ever suggest anybody dive right into and just do.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, there was every time we got a little tiny piece it was a win.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: And when you got that little tiny piece done then you looked at the next piece and as much as I have no patience this it was hard for me to take the time To try to put it together one little piece at a time.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: I just wanted just to say let's just do this and do it.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: But I knew in the back of my mind that if we did something like that it would probably fail.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: So we took our time.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: It took us probably close to two and a half years of putting little tiny pieces of the operations together before we actually entered into a joint powers agreement to merge the districts operations together.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: So in our case today, because of some legislation in Idaho, we can't merge the departments together.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: So we have a joint powers agreement to operate as one fire department with two separate budgets and two separate boards.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: So we're looking at changing some legislation to get that changed so we can become one.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: It sounds like it would be simple to erase a line between two districts and take the boards and put them together.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: But it's not that simple.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: So putting it together, you know, when you go to the firefighter level, you know we just want to do X and put it together.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: And after several of those little asks by them, I finally just pulled the plug on one of them.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: It just happened to be this program was called, it was a staffing module I can't even remember the name of it right now and I said well, there's a lot of pieces and parts, there's a lot of codes that are pay codes that are different in one than the other.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: So finally I just told them, I told it my staff just put it together Because that's what they want and this will be easy to fix, because it's going to cause a few problems.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: And it did cause a few problems.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Well, this isn't the same, this isn't the same.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: And we end up merging that piece together.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: And then I think that the firefighters understood that putting little pieces together at a time probably wasn't a bad idea.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: You know, fast forward to today.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: We all the administration, the staff, the firefighters we all just want to be one.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: You come to our organization.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Our shirts all say the same thing.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Our people are mixed up.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: You don't know who works for Middleton technically and who works for SAR technically, and I don't even know.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Sometimes somebody will say something and I'll have to run up and ask you know when does this person's paycheck come from?
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: Take away the political part of it with the state law changing and stuff, because there's only so much you can do to influence that.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: You're working hard to influence that, I know, but operationally, what were some of the hurdles that you had to overcome?
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Probably the simple things, the things that I think should be simple how the fire trucks were, how the equipment was put on, how the hoses were loaded, what hoses were used, what nozzles were used.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: In my mind that that should have been simple, it was probably we had to put groups of people together and have them show each other which, why they liked what they liked, and then come up with that kind of stuff.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: Those kind of operational things took longer than maybe, didn't take as long as I think it did, but it seemed like it took longer than I thought it should.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: I thought it should just take a few minutes and again, I don't have any patience, so that's what I would have thought, but it just took longer.
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: That's what being in government is all about.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: It is it's creating bureaucracy and more work for yourself.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: It's funny, I think a lot of us in the fire department do not like that at all, because I always start off conversations with my boss.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: It's like you know, I don't like bureaucracy but or I don't like bureaucracy.
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: We need to fix this.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: But in terms of pay and rank and qualifications for rank, was there any problems with any of that?
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: I was part of the reason.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: The first couple years were slower, the wages weren't equal and I thought it was very important that we were able to get wages and benefits to at least wages exactly the same.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: With having small budgets in two different fire districts, we had to work to get the wages to where they were the same.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: And then we worked on the benefits getting the benefits the same and after two and a half years we finally, on September 1st of this year, got the insurance to be exactly the same.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: So there is the union combine the two unions together to one.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: They did that early on a couple years ago and then our piece of it to get the benefits and everything to be exactly the same just actually finished on September 1st.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't that it was hard to do.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: There was always an obstacle, something on one side or the other just stopped, and it wasn't the employees by any means.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: It was either budget or insurance carrier or whatever the case may have been.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: But it just took a little time to get that together.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: But I did think it was very important that we get the wages and benefits, as at least the wages, exactly the same, before we put people on the same fire trucks.
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: I think there's huge opportunity in that, because when you balance, everybody's wages is typically you balance up, so nobody's going to make less money, somebody's going to make more money in the thing.
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: Now some people may not make as much, but that's because they're plateaued in that kind of whatever position they're in.
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: But that's one of the advantages, especially to the lower paid department, is that's the quickest way to bring their wages up.
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: I think they say, well, we're doing the same work as them.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: And then you know so you got the justification for it.
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: But, like you say, there's all kinds of hurdles you got to get through, especially politically and through the local government, that well, no, we don't pay like that.
• 12:04
  Speaker 3: And you think, well, we're merging, we got to, you don't have a choice now.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: So it almost puts them to the fire, which is a nice position to be in for the fire department.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: It was a little bit of a struggle to get it equaled out, but nobody, like you said, nobody went down in wages.
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: They never do.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: It's just the way it seems to work and it all evened out and it's in a good place right now.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: We're at a really good place today.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: We just really would love to merge and erase the boundaries and make it one fire district.
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: It's the most economical way to do business, really, when you look at it.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: I could.
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: My government employment was in a place where we did that.
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: Everybody was kind of the same, we worked off the same SOPs but there was big differences between each organization.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: Still, you know, we are war on uniforms and looking back on it, I think, well, why does?
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: There were 30 fire departments in the region here and they all had their own everything.
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: They had their own senior staff, they had their own fire chief and you're like, this is not.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: If you were building this from the ground up, there would be one senior staff in charge of all of this and then you would, you know, kind of break it down using that parametric military model we have.
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: So I think what you did is a lot harder is doing it.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: I joined the fire department was already done.
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: You guys were talking about certifying this group in trainers.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: They were already certified, some of them 10 years as an IC.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: So it just makes it easier when they come into trainer.
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: Same thing with joining a fire department.
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: It's already merged with everybody, basically, but you still have those separation issues with them.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: So it's it's like the best and worst of both.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, most definitely.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Our equipment's the same.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Now they work very hard to make sure that all the equipment is the same, you know for when they work overtime and each station and and I mean we're, we're set up great for the, for the community.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: We have a fire station in star, a fire station in Middleton and then one more fire station right in the middle, and so we're we're providing a better service to the community than than we did individually.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to say it was any cheaper to do it.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Yes, the wages of myself and the district administrator are split between the two, so that is a savings.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: But the ops chief and the fire marshal, their wages, they were separate organizations.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Their wages wash each other's out.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: So I think that after I started getting involved in the in the political part of the Idaho fire chiefs I took on being the chair of the legislative committee for the state this year.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: I'm surprised on how many fire departments I've gotten phone calls from that want to merge.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: I mean Northern Idaho, eastern Idaho, central Idaho, they.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: There are so many people, so many departments that are talking this way but are unable to do it because of legislation and they want to understand why we have a piece of legislation that says that you can do this, so why can't we do it?
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Well, there was new legislation put in three years ago that contradicted that, and so that's what we're going to work on changing.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: Was that purposeful?
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Did they do that to stop consolidations, or was it just a unintended consequence of other legislation?
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: I choose to believe it was an unintended consequence, and I've been talking to some legislators about it and they seemed to think that it was.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: It was not.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: They did not plan on that happening.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: Did I think that they may have known that it happened?
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: I think so, but I think they're willing to fix it.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: And so because, like FEMA, when they give grants, any kind of grants, whether it's AFG grants or a safety grant or whatever it is is one of the major benchmarks they look at.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: Does it lead to interoperability between fire departments or even consolidation?
• 16:15
  Speaker 3: I mean, that's what the Feds are looking for in the thing.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: So you, it doesn't make much sense why the state would want to stop that, because it does become more economical over time and, like you say, just doing it improves the service you can deliver to the community, because you go from one fire department to okay, we're a response organization now across a broader area.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, from where we were before, before we started operating as one.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: Like I said, star had one fire station in Star.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Middleton had one fire station in Middleton.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: They would.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: They'd go out on a call, the secondary call.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: They were coming from another town and these towns aren't like a big city, so the closest one to Middleton was Caldwell.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: That's still a few miles away.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: The closest station to the Middleton fire district was probably five miles.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: And then you had Star, where the closest fire station was probably three miles.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Both of them have separate CAD systems.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: The CAD systems don't talk to each other, so I couldn't get somebody from Canyon County to come into Star because it's in Ada County to help out.
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: So it always had to come from Ada County, even though the fire station in Middleton was closer.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: There's been, there's been struggles with that and I'm not going to put them down because they are working hard to fix it.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with the treasure valley, treasure valley is growing together.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: It's I'm not going to say it's like Phoenix, but it's.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: There's not going to be farm ground in between the communities anymore.
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah Well, it's like Phoenix that way.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: They asked a former here in the valley what's the most lucrative crop you've ever grown, and he stopped for a minute and thought and he says houses.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: Last one, but I made the killing off those.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the way it is.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: And so we've been fighting as Middleton and Star, with Ada County and Canyon County being separate dispatch agencies with different kind of CAD systems.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: We've been fighting that the entire time that I've been there.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: So Meridian and Napa Meridian is in Ada County, napa's in Canyon County their borders are growing together.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: I've told those agents, the dispatch agencies, I said these are a lot bigger than us and this is going to cause a lot bigger problem.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: I mean that Meridian built a fire station, I think is a mile from Napa's fire district.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: So there's going to be a lot more of this happening.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: So they're they're working on it, they're doing a good job.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to complain about that.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: But it'll be a huge relief for us to be able to have the dispatch centers communicate with each other.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: We can get calls out faster.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: There's no, the transferring stuff will be gone.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: Oh, exactly yeah, no redundancy anymore.
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: You know, shabbel from Indiana talks about that and the way they started consolidating the fire service in the state of Indiana was by county and it was through dispatch centers, and so what they started doing was shutting down like 80% of them and saying, no, we're going to have regional dispatch centers that dispatch for all of you and this is the way you got to do it.
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: So they become the driving force.
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: I mean, that's who takes the call in.
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: So they're kind of the first step in it, but it seems to have a good effect.
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: They started this whole process a few years ago, but when you talk to Tim about it, he says, no, it just it cleaned everything up, it made it simpler.
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: There's there's fewer regulatory bodies that you have to navigate between.
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: And then just the fact that all those dispatch centers got together and said we're going to have similar protocols and standards and communication language, what we call things, he says it just made it a lot easier for all of us to work together seamlessly.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Then yeah, we would love to have one dispatch center.
• 20:22
  Speaker 3: Oh, it would be tremendous.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: I mean, think of the savings there.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: We have, we have three Nampa has there for how many?
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: stations.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: I think of the count ambulance stations, I think between fire and EMS, because in my system the fire departments don't transport.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: Ada County has an ambulance district and candy County has an ambulance district, so they they are separate.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: I think.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Just an Ada County there's 46 stations, yeah, and then in Canyon County, of the ones that touch us, Nampa's got like six, Caldwell's got three.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: Those are the ones that border us and then as the farther you go out, the smaller organizations that are.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Now some are full time fire departments and some are still volunteer fire departments.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: In Ada County you don't have that.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: In Ada County they're all paid departments.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: So maybe 6070 departments and three different dispatch centers.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: That one could easily, more efficiently and effectively manage all those.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: I was talking to a dispatch director and then go too far off the topic, but a dispatch director in my county where we have one dispatch center that dispatches two stations, and I think you know it's a county of 1.6 million people, so we need to coordinate a lot better than we have been.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: But he said ideally in a metropolitan area like ours that has seven counties, we could do it with two dispatch centers.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: He said there's no way we need this and it doesn't matter where they are.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Now with networking and all the technology we have, those dispatch centers really could be anywhere.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: The reason why people had individual dispatch centers back in the day was because of VHF radios and non networked radios, so you had to be close with your transmitter to the people you were dispatching.
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: Now it doesn't matter, and LA County figured that out years ago with repeater systems and the kind of system they had.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: But we still haven't figured it out in the Midwest, which just doesn't make any sense at all.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: And what you're saying is the same thing.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: That the guys in Denver went through the Denver metropolitan area and their first step really is CAD to CAD.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: So and that has been a chore for them there were seven different Northern Denver area fire departments that are trying to get a CAD to CAD thing going and I think they've been successful so far.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: But it took years to get there.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: It took a lot of effort, so I think that's a great place to start those on the dispatch center.
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: You know we had Maricopa County is over 9,000 square miles and we did it all off simplex VHS radios with repeaters and you could always talk to command all the time.
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: In fact, that's the same system they're still using for IDLH operations is the VHF.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: Well, and my point, with the VHF, that was 1950s.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: The 1950s is why they needed the dispatch centers to be in local communities, exactly, and since when they started, like you said, repeaters, yeah it's like if there was a monsoon.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: When I first started in the early 80s is the next day the communication guys went out and redid all the towers and they put up all the little repeaters wherever they were.
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: So it was, it just became part of the gig.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: And then the huge failure for us was when 800 trunked, 800 megahertz trunked radios came in.
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: It just did not.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: Like you said, you can dispatch.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: Your dispatch center could be anywhere.
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: It could be a New York city and dispatch immediately for here it's just that if you were in a certain place and you hit the radio you weren't talking to anybody.
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: So I mean, that's its own set of.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the engineering behind that.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: It's got to be huge.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: And so back to the consolidation.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: When you guys were consolidating, did you have any cultural issues that you had to deal with, like one department leaned more on training, one department had green trucks, or you know, everyone wore white suits every day, or any craziness like that that you had to bring everybody closer together on?
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: No, no, we didn't.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: We operated very similar.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: The equipment in Star was newer than the equipment that we had in Middleton, so we've slowly been changing that.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: But our engines and everything are the same.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Now the culture of the people that do the work there's always going to be little differences.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: They had different instructors at different times in their careers but they're all fairly young guys and they were willing to, you know, willing to sit down and talk about it and work it out.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: You know, just kind of like the hose loads and the equipment placing and that kind of stuff.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: And really I would say the culture of the two organizations was probably the easiest piece.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: What part of that was relationships already being pre-established and them knowing each other and working with each other?
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: I think that that was probably a big piece of it.
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: They both were frustrated, you know, 10, 15 years ago that they couldn't go to each other's calls unless it was specifically asked.
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: Star specifically asked the dispatch center to get a hold of Canyon County and Middleton to come over because it was a big incident, and vice versa.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: Middleton would have a fire that was basically three and a half miles from the Star station but they would have to wait for units to come from Caldwell or Nampa because they dispatch centers didn't communicate that way.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: You know all that stuff has gotten better.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: I don't think any of them ever thought that they were better than the other.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: There is that within the fire service.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: I mean we have other neighbors that think that they're probably better than anybody else, but I mean I Well.
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: Greg, even within your own fire department, you have a shift who feels they're better than everybody else.
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no doubt.
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and you know they probably are.
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: Let's just give it to them.
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, yeah, we start with that letter.
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: And yeah, my hairless.
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: They're hairless, well grouped.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: So for folks undergoing this kind of consolidation, trying to get people together, what's the last word of advice that you would give them so they would have a?
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: successful consolidation.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: I would say take it slow.
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: If I had to do it all over again, if I had to start today, there wouldn't be a lot of things that I would change.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: I learned a lot of lessons, there's no doubt about that, but we didn't rush into anything.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: We started with the administration.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: We put them together, we got them operating together as one, learning each other's ways that they did things, come up with a way that seemed to work the best and adopted it, and then the same with all the other little pieces and parts of the operations of it is.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: We didn't rush in and do anything fast because that, just in my opinion, it would have tore people apart and it was really important to me to make sure that not one or the other ever pitted each other against each other.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: And I wouldn't change it.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Take your time, do it slow and don't just come in and say tomorrow morning you are now firefighter working for Fire Department X and this is the way it's going to be.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: Didn't want anybody to ever feel like they're being taken over.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Star can operate their fire department independently of anybody else.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: Middleton can operate their fire department independently of anybody else.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: I think they can provide a better service.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: That's why we're here.
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: We're here to provide a service.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: It's the work.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: That's why they're paying us.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: I think that just keeping that as core value of putting two organizations together is providing a better service for the customer.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: Mrs Smith, that's why we do it.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: We didn't do it to take anybody over and I think that that was a big deal Financially.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: They didn't need each other.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: Are they better financially together?
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Absolutely so.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: What's the sound on the back of the shirts?
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: Those Middleton Starfire districts?
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: So you merged into one, basically operationally, and then everybody kept their same admin and payrolls.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Will you merge those eventually?
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: Merge those first.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: So you'll do that.
• 29:19
  Speaker 3: Maybe once the legislation, the political climate changes and you guys can get back and merge into one.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: There should be a benefit to doing that If that's the most efficient, effective way there's.
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: The local body politics should give some kind of incentive for fire departments to merge that way.
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: I agree, I don't know if it's it, I don't know, bigger budget is what it is, but something, something that gives you more, more reason to get together and do that.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean when I talked to legislators about that topic and I don't tell them we're doing this to save money, mm-hmm, yeah, I mean that's because they didn't end of the day, any money that we save is going to be to add firefighters, to open up stations, to get better response times.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: You're.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: The fire service hasn't gotten slower, no, we're.
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: We keep taking on more and more work, just as a matter of course.
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: You have to support that on the politics side.
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: You can't.
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: You can't deliver Service today like you did 15 years ago.
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: It just you can't finance it.
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: To say you can't do anything.
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: The same way, because you no longer become an emergency response, your response times become completely out of whack.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: I had a buddy in Montana who was a fire chief.
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: He had an ambulance.
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: That that's how they delivered paramedic service.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: They had one ambulance and two paramedics and then they had to fire truck or two.
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: He made the case to the communities and listen, if one of us has a heart attack, the rest of us don't have paramedic level service for two hours.
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: He says that's how long it takes to work that call and get the paramedics back in service.
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: And he says this this community has grown 300 percent since I've taken over four years ago as a fire chief.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: We're gonna do a levy to vote on this.
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: And and it was man, it was pennies, pennies.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: The mill would have been.
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: And it all rich people.
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: They all had moved from California and sold their houses for this much and they bought their houses for 10% of that.
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: He put the thing up, advertised it and it was soundly defeated in the election and he left.
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: About six months later he says I do not want to waste my time being your fire chief anymore.
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: You people just don't give a shit.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: So so leaving it up to the voters ain't always the.
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: The customer doesn't always vote in their favor.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: That's where that's the where we're at and we have to go for a levy increase Because of some legislation.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: It was changed three years ago.
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, man, those are tough to.
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: I mean just people don't want their taxes raised.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: This is a general course and they, the legislation they put in place three years ago reduced their taxes.
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so it reduced staffing.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: And I explained to them that we have people moving here that have a different expectation.
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: Oh, I mean your friend in Montana.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: We're doing the same thing.
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: People are selling their houses in California in mind too, yeah.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're moving their whole family out and they don't understand why they don't have a fire hydrant.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: They don't understand in some cases they don't understand why they don't have fire sprinklers.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: In California, apparently that's a mandate.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: You put fire sprinklers in your house and so we get those phone calls all the time.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: Why don't we have fire sprinklers In Idaho?
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: You can't tell somebody to put fire sprinklers in their house.
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: They put you in jail probably, and chain ran kind of like that.
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: He showed up with a national guard.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: And they're moving out to these rural areas that don't have a municipal water supply.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean it's.
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: Well, if you think you're getting LA's city services in the tundra, you move for a reason.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: Well, here's the thing I've noticed with levies and anything that's left to the voters and I think being a representative democracy definitely has its pluses but they take everything out on us For the lowest form of government they have access to.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: So a lot of times their frustration with the kind of government they don't have access to they take out on us Because we're right there, we're in the local community.
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: So trying to educate them on how their taxes actually get spent, how little bit of their taxes actually go to the fire department and how much of their taxes is going to other things, is an important piece of this, because they do take it out on us all the time and they just see dollar signs, right.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: The other thing is is you got these communities who they were used to very low-cost fire protection for years and years, and you know these times have changed.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: We can't recruit people.
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: You can't pay somebody $39,000 a year to be a firefighter anymore.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: It just doesn't work.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: So in order to even be competitive and get great employees through the door, it's going to take some of that competitive dollars in order to do that.
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: The only one that can financially operate a municipal fire department is the government.
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: They have the resources to do it, you know, and that's kind of what you pay your taxes for.
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: So you know you want parks and libraries, but when you, one of your loved ones, is having some kind of emergency, you call 911, hoping that somebody's going to show up in a time frame that they can actually intervene in that emergency.
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: So, and I think when you explain to people, no, when you vote against us to do this, don't call 911 anymore.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: We're not going to be there in six minutes, we're going to be there in 10 minutes.
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: And so, and the further out you live, it's going to be 20 minutes, it's going to be 30 minutes.
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: And, like you said, they don't.
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: Well, no, you can't do that.
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: If that I didn't do it, you did it you.
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, uneducated voters are not good for anybody.
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, society, the government, anyone is.
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: That's like I tried to explain to some legislators.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: You know, and I, when I started this quest to fix this house bill to try to get emergency services funding back, you know, at first I thought that all special districts because Minnleton and Starr are districts, so we're not tied to a city, we have great relationships with the cities and we protect their cities, but we're districts, so we're a separate taxing entity.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: And then we looked at the cemetery district and the irrigation district and all that kind of stuff.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: They all got something to sell.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: I got nothing.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I got nothing to sell.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: State statute says how much I can charge to do a daycare inspection.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: State statute says how much we can charge to do a plan review.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: State statute says how much to do a beer and wine license inspection.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Those are pennies.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: I mean $25, $50, $100, whatever.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: It's not going to, it's not going to buy a firefighter Mm-hmm.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: So trying to educate the legislators to understand that you know, a cemetery district, although they don't want to, can raise a price of a plot.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: They can raise a price of digging a hole and burying somebody.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: Irrigation district they don't want to, but they can increase the price of the water.
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: We got nothing.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: There's nothing that we have nothing to sell.
• 36:53
  Speaker 3: No, well, they don't pay for our, they pay for our service through their taxes, essentially.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: So yeah, All right, you guys want to do a little timeless tactical truth.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: We may as well All right Stand by.
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: We're tactical people.
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: We're truthful, painfully.
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah oh.
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: Timeless tactical truth.
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, alan Bernacini, and this one we'll put on the screen here.
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: Ooh, big Al, we are the last stop for Mrs Smith when her kitchen is burning.
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: There ain't no 9-1-2.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: That goes very well with this conversation, right?
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, people don't have an alternative.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: They have us as their provider, and not only do we have to be prepared to take care of their issue, we have to educate them on how we take care of their issue.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: What do you guys think about that one?
• 37:50
  Speaker 3: You know really the staffing piece of it in funding firefighters.
• 37:53
  Speaker 3: I think the thing that really supercharged that was EMS.
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: Is you could justify our EMS numbers in response in more tangible, understandable terms to the body politic and the community in general.
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: It takes four of us to do CPR on a period yeah.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: There are four qualified medical professionals there and four to six minutes to make a difference in the outcome of that incident.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: Firefighters were the most popular occupation until a paramedic firefighter was invented and then they moved ahead because they do that much more on the medical side.
• 38:34
  Speaker 3: So that's and that defines pretty much every fire department in the community.
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: So I think that's the message we use to push that out.
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: Get argue with that one.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: I think, again with people, we need to educate them on what it takes.
• 38:49
  Speaker 2: Right now, the place where I work, we have a goal of delivering 17 firefighters on the scene within 11 minutes and 30 seconds and we're not doing it.
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: It's taking us 20 minutes and 30 seconds to deliver 17 firefighters.
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: And that's a goal, and that's an NPA 1710, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a simple staffing model.
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: It's a very simple staffing model but we still get somebody walking by.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: We had a successful rescue a couple of weekends ago.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: Maybe walking her dog in the neighborhood stops one of the fire captains and says is this all really necessary, do you really need all these people here?
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: And you go.
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: Man, we just rescued somebody from a house.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: She was just taken to the hospital in critical condition.
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, still, there's just way too many firefighters here.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: I mean, they're seeing dollar signs, right, and it's frustrating for us, but that just tells me it's like we've got to continue to educate the folks on how many people it actually takes to do our job.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Fortunately, we do have a lot of retirees that have moved, retired firefighters and police officers that have moved from Southern California to the Treasure Valley of Idaho.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: You know they're very supportive of, of of of different staffing models.
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: That's a double edged sword, though.
• 40:05
  Speaker 3: When you get a retired firefighter especially if that was the rank that they held was firefighter on the fire board, because there's a 50% chance that person is not going to be your friend.
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they yeah for a variety of reasons.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was told once that you do not want retired firefighters on your political board.
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they, they may explain what you're doing to you.
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Thank you very much, yeah.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: All right, greg Tomenski, thank you very much for being here and sharing your experiences with consolidation will include your contact information.
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: So if anybody has a question and they're going through a consolidation themselves, or they're looking to bring some fire departments together, even functionally or administratively, you can give them some advice.
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: So I think it's a great example for us.
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's, that's great.
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: All right, happy to help Right on Till next time.
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: Peace.