Council - Regular Meeting

We're 6 o'clock and our fire department retreat. Present. The floor is yours, Mr. Frasier. Good evening. And uh I I really want to thank you guys. I like this uh the way you guys do this. You have an opportunity to come and talk to this. This is a nice change of pace for me to be able to sit down and present to you guys. So I enjoy it. And also let you guys know that I've really only been here two months, but I've really enjoyed this town and all the people I met. It's just been a really nice atmosphere. So sorry, move that over a little bit. It is a little golden jewel. We have

It is. There you really is. Yeah. So, you guys know what you have here, right? Well, thank thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh I just go through this. I've got a lot of stuff to add into it. If you guys have any questions, ask me along the way. Um this is our current mission statement. I just put it in there for you guys to see. Um like I said, if you don't get the email, it's just following along directly with what's on there. And this is kind of like the idea of what we try to I think it's me. I think I got it too too much. There. Is that better? Okay.

All right. So, this is just our mission statement of how we operate at the department. And this was prior to me. This is a uh just a good thing to look at to know how we operate and why we do what we do. So, uh next page 2025 operational overview. We made 769 calls for service last year. That's combination of our automatic aid which is a very much a value ad to this community because we get a lot of service from other departments around that they reach out and help us on these runs that we are able to meet the numbers we need of fires with the help of Jackson Township and Noblesville and White River. So automatic data is a big part of what we do here. Last year, EMS counted for 58% of our run volume. And uh one thing I can tell you from just my time watching this department, the EMS operations of this department are top-notch. They have a very very high-end understanding of medical care at the medic level and they provide a a high level of ALS, advanced life support. So you guys have a very very good value in this community for what you have with that. types of responses they had last year. We had fire hazardous materials. We had

I'm sorry. Yeah. No, go ahead. Automatically versus No, I'm trying to pull that up. We're having trouble with our system because we had to switch reporting systems in the year. So, we're having trouble generating reports off the new software and everybody's having trouble with the new software. They went from a system called Niffers, National Fire in Reporting System, to NERS, which is National Emergency bonds something, but changing over the new software that everybody's gone to. Everybody's having trouble. Even CAD dispatch is having trouble generating the reports that we're looking for. Um, so I don't I can't break it down fully like of how many were in and how many were out. Okay. Yeah, I'll try to get that. I'm I'm We're working on that. I've got some things in here that we're working on we're going to try to get you better numbers on.

Okay.

Along the way. Uh so our type of runs are fire, hazardous materials, a lot of multi- agency operations which goes into the automatic aid. Uh we have our water emergencies which are kind of come and go less than I thought we would have but they are out there. Um lots of vehicle accidents and lots of falls. I feel like that's a lot of what we do. And I'm talking to Emily a little bit about we're working on some uh programs at the library that we're going to do some fall prevention stuff for elderly people in the community trying to kind of help them and go through their commute houses and things of what can we do to keep you from having falls. A lot of it's just trip hazards and teaching them how to kind of set their house up in a safe manner. So a lot of that hopefully will help some of that going forward. All right, next page. So biggest thing we've been talking about is ISO. So, good news. Not fir not firm yet, but we've got some good news from ISO. Um, we've made some changes to our operations. So, we are now operating everything in the town limits because we have fire hydrants. We're operating our ladder, which gives us dual points as a ladder and an engine to Quint. So, as of the email I got a couple weeks ago, we're still waiting for verification that they actually make the thing happen, but they are we probably going to be a class four again. So, we've actually gone back to where we started. So, the idea before was we were going to go, they were saying we could be a 10, we were going to go back to a five, and now it looks like we're going to squeak back into a class 4 at 60.5 points, which 60 to 70 is that ranking for a class 4. So, I don't have the official word yet, but I've got the word from the gentleman who's been helping us that it looks like they've been able to recalculate some stuff and get us to a class 4. So that should be official around the July time period when we hit that year mark. Um but we are still if you look at the next page which is just

part of this it's actually how they calculate and that's our that's our current um numbers for ISO and that just kind of breaks down how they do it. Our new our newest uh numbers are going to be very similar to what that page says. So when I get that new page in the official uh review will get that information all out to you so you can see exactly what it is. Uh, also one of the things that really is going to help us in the future and helped us this time, uh, a lot, we're going to work with, uh, DJ from water company a lot on making sure we're testing our hydrants and we can get that information to them. Uh, the new improvements to the water systems are going to help us a lot because that really is going to increase pressures, especially to the west side of the reservoir. I know we have a lot of issues when the uh, summertime where everybody's using water, watering yards, things like that. The water pressure drops a lot on that side. So that's one thing that we feel is going to help a lot once this is all completed. So those three things will really help us currently but going forward in the future on our ISO reviews. Uh next page. Any questions about ISO going forward? Um training. So training is another big part of ISO that we're dealing with and we're really trying to dial in our training. There's a lot of points we lose just based on documentation. A lot of it's the nature of how we operate because it's very hard to get training hours for our part-time people, but they also count against us when we get evaluated. So, uh, last year we had 1775 total hours in the department. We're working now to where everybody who's a part-time person who's affiliated with another department, we're going to require them to give us their full training for the year, which we can add into ours. Um, and that helps us with our training because if a person, you know, is fully trained and they say, let's say they work for Noblesville, they get all their training there. If we don't have record of it, it doesn't help us because it shows that person hasn't gotten any training. We still have to do some training internally with those people also. But when we can pull their training records in from their department they work full-time at, we can implement that into our training and add a lot of points into our future ISO reviews. Um, this

year with the things we've really kind of uh over the last couple months have kind of zeroed in on is we really need to work on officer development programs. Um, and we need to work on EMS continuing education, which is getting a lot of our new people up to speed on the high level of how we operate on EMS because like the new people we brought in, it's a new different world to them. They're learning at a very fast pace of how we do EMS here in Cyro. So, that's been a lot of the training we've been doing. And then we're going to start really focusing a little bit on this specialized and technical training. You know, we have a giant body of water in the middle and we really haven't done a lot of water training necessarily. So, we're really going to try to get that to where we can affect water rescues and we can do it safely for our people. So, we've got a lot of training planned on that. Most of that we can do inhouse. Um, a lot of it I can do. We have other people that are coming in that can teach it. So, it's not something that's going to be a cost to us where we have to go find somebody to do it. We can do a lot of that internally. Um, community engagement, fire prevention. So, fire inspections, you know, this town is a good size. So there's about 120ish businesses that we have to inspect over the course of a year and uh it's very manageable. So we've got a good plan in place to make sure we're hitting all of our businesses every year. Just doing basic fire inspections on it. There's not a lot of high risk um in this community we really have to deal with, but we're going to kind of go through just make sure there's a lot of like things that we consider risk that a lot of people think of. There's a lot of these businesses down here that have basements that nobody realizes has a basement or there might be a common basement from these buildings being old between several buildings in a row. So, just identifying those things and then we can put all that information into our notification alert system. So, when it comes up, we can actually click on it and it'll have a notes page and it'll actually tell us, hey, this building has a basement that's shared with three buildings. The entrance is on the east side of the building, things like that. So combining all of our inspections into that program will give us a lot more knowledge based when we're responding to

buildings in town and businesses, you know, what hazardous materials do they have? You know, like uh tire businesses are notorious for storing tires in their basement or around their buildings. So, I mean, it's just a large fire load that we want to be aware of and make sure that we know about. Um tried to do a lot of smoke alarm installations around town. Smoke detectors are our biggest um life safety thing that we can do. If we can put a smoke detector in your house, that's going to do more than anything we can do to prevent a fire fatality. So, we're going to try to really work on that to make sure we um get out and make sure we have that in the community and then uh do a lot of development and business outreach where we're explaining to people why we do what we do. Most most rules that follow follow into our inspection and Indiana code or fire code all revolve from something bad that happened. you know, something bad happened and they looked at building said, "Hey, we probably shouldn't do this because somebody died in this building or something bad happened or things like that." So, things as simple as like inward and outward swinging doors, they determine that, you know, a uh inward swinging door on a business where people are trying to get out is bad, you know, little things like that. So, you start seeing little things like that. So, we're going to really try to do some uh outreach and education with the local businesses on kind of why we do the things we do and what the expectations are.

So, with Steve retiring and end there were multiple people taking over that role specific training they need to take I'm sure you're all

yeah so we are we're actually a lot of it's software driven so we just had a meeting Friday um so Scott Rickman who's our newest chief that came in he's going to kind of head that up and he kind of he handled that for me in Cooko that's kind of what part of what he did so he's going to kind of oversee that but we have a we're doing a little a bit of a combination of how we're going to do inspection. So, we're going to start doing um crew level inspections. So, when we identify a building that maybe, you know, you say you walk into here and there's an exit sign and there's not a lot in here to inspect. Well, we can we can send a crew over here. We have inspect like multiple people that are licensed to be inspectors. The crew levels can come over and do these type of inspections. We're going to identify which ones are more high hazard, which ones have more things we need to inspect and that will be done more by so Andrew Pasquali and Scott Rickman are going to kind of team up and they're taking that over there on the same ship. So their shift is going to kind of run all everything inspections whether that's preparing for the Fourth of July or the haunted trail or anything like that. They're going to take over that role and run all that.

Okay. Yeah. Let's see. um budget. I'm still I'm really going through this budget. I'm trying to figure out kind of the things and where everything is and what makes sense how to do it. So, it's so early on. You know, I've only got a couple months into this. So, couple things we're looking at is we're I've talked to uh Jim a little bit about we're going to really start reaching out looking researching on our own what grants are available and get them to the person we are using for grants. Try to identify grants that we could actually use and are valuable to us. Go forward from that. at all. Am I?

Not yet. We've we've I I've got one sent to me, but it was a wildfire grant. It really didn't apply to us. We didn't have it. It was for out west, that kind of thing. You know, we could say we have wildfires here with the crops, but I mean, it's a different type of animal of what they were the things they could do for us. And that grant didn't really apply to us. So, yeah, but he Yeah, she's already found something and sent it to us. So, and Jim, I talked to Jim about working to get us we can we can identify them from our side, too. The writing it. It's not finding, it's just writing it. So, having a person to write the grant, if we can identify it, send it to her, that'll be helpful to us. Um, kind of Oh, yeah. Noted.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. J told me that she was going to work on um kind of going through our capital investments like what kind of things could be are coming up in the future. I've kind of gone through the list and the list kind of stays the same. There's nothing really changing. Um most of it's going to be based on growth of the area, what if there's growth, where do we need to start looking at, you know, where do we lack resources, where do we lack response, where do we do things like that. So, a lot of it's just going forward for that. Like I said, I haven't gotten deep into that in my two months yet, but we're we're starting to identify those things and put them down. And then, you know, kind of cost containment measures. The the most of what runs here is pretty efficient. You kind of go through I haven't seen a lot left. One thing I've noticed is the firefighters here are very good about taking care of what they have and making sure that they do like I mean they you have an entire maintenance staff that maintains the building, maintains the trucks, maintains everything. I mean, like if a light breaks, they break, they fix the light. If something on the truck breaks, they fix the truck. I mean, they're very good at maintaining everything they possibly can. Nothing leaves that fire station unless it's out of their scope of ability. So, they do a very good job of like internal maintenance on the building and the equipment. So, that's been very good to see. All right, let's see. All right, SWAT analysis. So, if you don't know, this is something we use in fire a lot. SWAT is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It's kind of how we break down our department. How do you look at your community? How do you look at your department? Things you can do. So these are just kind of go through a list of things. So these are the strengths that so far I've identified that really stand out here. So we have a strong community automatic a network. So we get a lot of support from all our surrounding communities. And we also give a lot of support. That's a uh a integral part of how we operate. Like there's no way we could operate most of the things we do if we didn't have the support. And it's not mutual aid. Mutual aid is you have to call and ask for their help. The entire system of Hamilton County is set up for automatic

aid. The run sheets are already laid out. If there's a fire here right now, they will know who the trucks are that come. If those trucks are busy, it goes like 90 deep into the next truck, the next truck, the next truck, and they've even run it into the surrounding counties who would come if everybody's tied up. So, anytime there's a big incident here, it automatically happens. We don't have to think about it. We don't have to ask for it. it just is already in the CAD. So, it's a it's a great program and it operates very smooth here. Um, keeping us at an ISO classification of four, it's going to be very good for the community as far as, you know, cost of insurance and things of that nature. Um, this I feel like I mean I've I've experienced it so I say this from experience that I feel like there's a very supportive town leadership here. You guys are very easy to talk to. Um, you guys are easy to give information to. It's very easy sit down and talk to you guys about anything. So, I really appreciate that. I think that's a big strength for this area. Uh potential growth, like I said, I don't know what that's going to look like, but potential growth has a big impact on what we do here. But I also see it as a positive for this community and for the fire department. Um my experience from being here for a few months, we have very good set of professional firefighters. They know their job, they train hard, they do their job very well, and they are very curious and very eager to learn. So, for example, I've come from a big technical rescue background. That's a lot of what I did in my previous job. And that's something that we they haven't had the chance to do here. And we've already started planning that out. They're very excited about it. So, any new skill or any new um any new opportunity, they're ready to go. They're very excited to do it. So, I've really enjoyed that about this group. And then the medics here are top-notch. Uh we have probably some we have probably the most open uh skills of whatever a our medical director if an EMT can or if a paramedic can do it he lets us do it and he trains them. So it's not like he just says hey

if you guys can figure out do it he trains them. We do a lot of training on things uh anything from ultrasounds to pushing the highest level of medication because a lot of times they're out this way to the north. They might be out there a long time really on a patient and you know it might be a while till they get support or anything they need and they have to be able to treat in the field. It's a very different world here because the closest hospital may be Riverview or maybe they may have to go to Indian down to Westfield or even to Indianapolis. So they travel all over the place. So they have to be able to do any medicine any medical um any medical thing that they can do to keep the patient stable and save a life they're able to do and they're able to do it in a very effective manner. So the medics in this department are definitely one of the strengths. Any questions on that? All right. Weaknesses. So anytime you have strengths and you assess your weaknesses. Uh first thing, administrative capacity. We have a one thing I've noticed is our administrative people on the line. So the line chiefs, battalion chiefs, the three of them, they are tied up with a lot of administrative work just due to the nature of us only having a fire chief in the office. So they they get tied up in a lot of that which actually takes away from their fire side like the things they need to be doing for fire they struggle to do because they spend so much time actually doing administrative work. So that's one of the issues one of the things I've identified and we're just kind of about how can we ease some of that going forward. Uh facility limitations and out growing the current station. Um as we grow, we're finding that we're really cramped in there and that's not a thing that's going to change anytime soon, but we're just know that if we get any bigger than we are, we are maxed out in that station. That station wasn't built to live in. That station was built as a volunteer fire station. It wasn't made for a lot of people to be in. And it's they're definitely on top of each other all the time, which you know they It's fine.

They they do all right, but just future for future growth. That's one of the things to be aware of. Uh apparatus life cycle challenges. So we have the engine which is a 2006 engine, so it's, you know, 20 years old now. And then we just bought the ladder, but the ladder is also a 2010. They both work very well. They're very mechanically sound trucks. But you also have to know that anytime you have a firetruck of that age, at any time it could have a catastrophic breakdown. Um this last weeks. I think uh Jackson Township's been dealing this. They have two engines. Both of them are down. They're actually in a Noblesville fire truck operating because both their trucks aren't operational, broken the last couple weeks. So, brand new truck, it broke. Yeah, fire trucks are

It's not built like the old stuff.

Fire trucks are I'll tell you what, I will tell you this. Anything that's mechanical, the old mechanical trucks, we have a We had a 1991 truck that had been sitting had been used for years. Has just been in storage. went put battery charger on, fired it up, worked like a champ. Like it like like it had never stopped working and it just had nothing nothing mechan it was all mechanical. There was nothing electronic on that truck. Everything now is very very very electronic. So that stuff all, you know, has gremlins and problems. So it's just part of what you deal with. But just be aware that, you know, even though we did get a new ladder truck, it's still a 15-y old ladder truck and it has the potential to have a problem. Hopefully doesn't. Like I said, it's it operates very well. It's a good So, we try to do our best to keep it in that manner. Um, full-time versus part-time. So, we have a lot of, you know, it's a lot of positive and it's a lot of negative deal. But the negative, the weakness of the part-time versus full-time is it's inconsistent. We we don't really control them. They're working a secondary job for us. We're not their primary employer. So, we have a lot of issues with, you know, somebody might put themselves on the schedule and then they get called for their department, have to work. the day before they just pull themselves off the schedule. We get a lot of that. So, we're scrambling to try to fill that spot at the last minute and that's just one of the weaknesses we run into with part-time staff. Uh they they do an incredible job for us. They are making up a lot of shifts. They're eating up a lot of hours for us, which has been really good. But if you look down the next one, so in January we were 455 hours of unfilled time. That's how many hours we didn't fill in the month January. 217 in February. Part of the difference is we are fully staffed. We hired the extra person to replace Steve, got him up and running in the middle of February. So that cut down quite a bit of every time. But this is also kind of a false sense of security because we're in this the time of year where nobody's taking vacation. It's nobody vacations that much in January, February. So

vacation season will start here in March into March. So March through the end of the year is kind of where we start getting into that. So you know, we have that that liability of every day if person is off, we're filling three positions, 72 hours a day. So, that's that's the challenge for us is to be able to do that. And as the summer also comes along, a lot of our part- timerrs will start working more overtime at their departments they work at. So, they aren't as available much. So, we kind of have that's the liability we run into with the part-timers. Um, but, you know, they've they've definitely filled a lot of spots for us in the last couple months. All right. Opportunities. So, we've been doing a lot of uh crunching of numbers, and this is one thing that I want to present to you later in the year. But the idea is, is it cheaper to hire three firefighters and have 15 of for 18 positions, like one more person today versus the cost of overtime, part-time? Um, we probably are at about a I would say we're at a 6040 split currently of overtime versus part-time. So, we're definitely using more overtime than we are part-time, and that's just the nature of the availability of them. Um, we're working on that. Something I'm not ready to present yet, but I just want you to be aware that's something I'm trying to put together to present to you and see if we can show that it's actually cheaper to have three more more full-time people. And if we are in the ballpark of being in that same cost, it's much more stable for our fire department to schedule. If we're scheduling one a day versus three a day or two a day or two a day versus three a day, that makes a huge difference for us in scheduling. Uh the next thing our inspection program expansion. So one thing we're doing is a lot of our uh technology we use we can as we do an inspection on a property we can actually upload that into our

response software. So when we have a run, you know, like my watch will go off if we have a run and we have a couple programs that tell us gives us all the details what happens, but we can actually put uh we can put floor plans in, we can put hazards in, we can put anything in for that building as we go. So as we start going through the inspection process, we're doing that, but we're also going to try to work a lot to really get the we don't do inspections on anything residential. So residential is we don't inspect. It's only commercial in Indiana we respect inspect, but we can voluntarily get information from homeowners to put in there. So, like for example, we had a gentleman call today and he called and I talked to him and his question was he has a fall device that if he falls, he can push a button or it detects he falls. He just wanted to make sure it works. So, we're having a conversation about that. He said, "Well, I want I'm I know that if you guys come to my house, you know how to get the key to get into my house." Well, in our programming, we can hit his address when we get dispatched there and it'll say special notes. We pulled it. It'll say there's a key in the back in the fake rock or something, you know, and it'll tell us exactly where to get the key. So a lot of times we have elderly people that fall, they can't get to the door and we don't want to break their door down. So we have methods in here to put the information in that we can do that. So we're going to really focus on trying to expand that and get a lot more of that data put in for the community where especially high-risisk people we can get into their homes and be able to respond to them without causing damage to their houses if they're down. Um this is probably the best thing that has happened in the last couple months. So, um, I have a good relationship with all the chiefs in the county. I I knew most of them before I got here just from being the chief of Copo for a while. So, I've made good relationship with them, but they've been very helpful to us. Like, I can't say enough for the partnerships that they've offered and help form already. But, one thing we're doing is training is very hard for us just from the number of people we have. You know, if I if I have our engine needs to go train, well, we can't there's no place to train here. We're either going to Noblesville or the new training facility. So the question was how do we actually send our people to train without it costing us overtime because I would either have to bring

them in on their days off and do it on a day they're not working or we have to have a system to where when we train somebody helps us. So we've been working with Noblesville very heavily on this process and I think we've got it set up to where they're going to do some partnerships with us where 7s4s is right down the street here. Things like that like so if we need to go train with them with Noblesville they can come and backfill and spend that learning our area because they respond here all the time anyways. This is a first response area to them. So, we're doing we're working on partnerships and we're already there. Uh our first live burn training with Noblesville is going to be the March 18th, 19th and 20th. And they have station 77 which is out by Ruof way out there. Um they have a burn facility out there. So, we're going to start working with their crews that we work with here on live burn training. So, we're going to do some rotation of crews and actually get our guys out there and do training with Noblesville. And then we are pretty much going completely to follow Noblesville's training uh regimen. So we can stay um it gives it g it takes one of the responsibilities off of our people because we don't have to come up with that every year. They have it. We can just follow along with them and train with them as it comes up. It also gives us an opportunity to do multi- agency training where we can go meet with it. You know, we can get with the closest stations and we can find a place to show up and train together. So that's a really good um partnership that we formed with them and are very happy to do it. They've been, like I said, I can't say enough about the other cities in this in Hamilton County. They've been great to work with there. Anything we need, what do you need, let me know. We'll do everything we can to help you guys out. So, that's been a very good thing to to see. Um, and then we also will have uh next I think we're talking they're saying December, but it might be a little bit later, but the Hamilton County Training Center is going to be done for police and fire, which is going to be a state-of-the-art training facility. It'll be one of the best in the country. Half of it's police, half of it's fire. We'll have full access to that. And they're really working on

we're working as a Hamilton County group to put a we have a training site called uh Vector Solutions. We're working on putting that together where we all have access to the same training materials, the same program, same everything. So, for example, there was a training event going to happen at this the training facility when it's done, they could send out all of the uh pre-inccident information like here's what we're doing, here's what we're going to be you're going to need, uh here's the safety briefing, here's all the things that we could get all that done before we start. So, the partnerships we're forming are really good. It's really going to help this community a lot. And uh the last one for opportunities is the safer grants always out there. Um like I said before, I I would I would be hesitant to approach a saver grant till it's something you really really need because if you get it for two or three people you know it's it is money but it's not that much but if if CISO grows to where we need a second station that's when it needs to be addressed because that's when you start saying hey we need to fund 12 positions not three positions you know and that's that's a much more cost-effective way to do it going forward. All right, threats. So last part of this is always threats. That's the things that we see that we have to focus on that could happen and we just have to be aware of and be ready for it. So you know of course inflationary cost of apparas it's going up all the time and it's just a non-stop thing. So if anything goes breaks or any issues like that would happen, we would have to address that and it's always more and more every year. Uh recruitment and retention challenges. So that's probably one of the biggest things that we are going to deal with going forward. And I have some I'll talk about it later a little more in depth, but you know it's just how do you how do you find high quality people to fill your positions and how do you keep them is what we really face and it's not just us it's the entire fire service. Everybody's having the same issues and challenges. So go through that uh ISO retrogression

risk. We don't want to go back in that do again. So we're making sure that all the things that could sneak up on something we're going to take care of and try to be ahead of that the curve so the next time there's not even a question. We know where we are. We don't have to deal with this again. Like I said before, age of apparatus is a threat just based on what we have that we have a 15y old and a 20-year-old uh vehicles. Um coverage of the west side is a little bit of a threat just from response time, water usage, things of that nature. So we we do know that. Um one of the biggest concerns I have as threats is for the fire department. It's not really our area, but Jackson Township, past the town limits, when you get into those giant houses that are all quarter mile up the road, a windy driveway up a hill, there's no water out there. there's nothing. I mean, it's a very, very challenging response and just the it may not be our area, but there most likely we're there first. So, our crews are going to be the first people handling those situations on some of these houses. So, that's one of the things that I've I definitely have a concern about and I think that's where a lot of our training with Nolesville and the other entities will really help us a lot because they're going to be coming in with us and as as long as we all work really well together, I think we can mitigate a lot of that risk out there. Um, and retention of medics. So, retention of medics, I'll talk about a little bit later, but that's one of our biggest issues. Medics are hard to find. when you lose one, if you lose one, it's very hard to replace. And that's our biggest issue right now that we have currently eight paramedics. One will retire 2028, beginning of 28, so we'll be down to seven. So, one of the biggest pushes I have is to find met paramedics. How do we find them? Where do they come from? How are we going to go forward with that? Like I said, they're very, very hard to find. Uh our strategic priorities for this year are basically kind of getting staffing stabilization retention. The stabil stabilization I was talking about earlier. We need to be able to fill all of our spots all the time 247. That's

the goal. So we have a lot of holes and you'll see I think might be the one of the next pages in there. But um that's part of the biggest thing we need to work on. Um officer development is a big one. We're really trying to work on creating the next generation of officers who's going to take the spots coming forward. Um, like I said, the expanded risk based inspections are a lot what we're doing. We're really going to identify if there's any risks in the town and commercial businesses or even, you know, you can even see a residential that could be a risk based on what's in the backyard. Is there stuff piled up? Do we see can we see that the house could be a hoarder house? Things like that. So, we're really going to focus on identifying risks in town. And that comes into the data driven performance metrics. We really are going to start looking into what areas of town and and Chief Overholster has done this a lot. This isn't anything new. It's just a matter of staying on top of it and seeing where do we make the most runs in which areas. What type of runs are they? Um are there any things that are causing us problems that we need to be aware of based on distance, number of people, things of that nature. Kind of what I talked about out past the town limits. Um we've been doing a lot of uh collaboration with EMA and the county government as far as like availability. This county is so good at providing resources and being there to help like this this it's just amazing to me what they offer and what they do. So, you know, like our it runs through them, our computers, this computer, our radios, if we need anything, it's a phone call to them and it's fixed like that. They're just a very, very good organization and resource for our fire department. And then the last of our strategic priorities is so in the fire service we have a chief who is in the car who's the first one there. He's taken off and he's going to kind of figure out what's happening. He's going to be radioing back to the incoming. But the one thing we don't have is we don't have a

officerbased hierarchy. So any given day up to this point, we're working on this right now. We didn't have a you're in charge of the truck today or you are driving the truck or you are on the back of the truck. It was just a random every day we're going to see who wants to do what each day. Each engine on a fire or ladder, the the company needs should have a company officer and that person is charge in charge of the people on there because of the like Christian and Darren for example, when they show up at a fire, their job is to be outside and their command basically their job is to look at the fire, make sure the house is safe and make sure the people working are safe and that's their most of their job to direct crews to direct people coming in. So that's mostly what they do inside the building. If they go in to fight a fire, there should be a person who is the officer who's making decisions and we don't have that. So that's one of the things I want to look at is creating three captains positions. So we have an officer on shift and then what happens is if that that battalion chief is off the secession is that officer is going to move up and that person is going to be training for the next job. We don't have it currently have any method of like secession planning of when chiefs leave or things like that. So, this helps that because if you don't have that, it's usually it falls into um your promotions are typically by time on the job as opposed to experience or ability. We want to create that almost like competition, but you know, there should be some competition for that next job. Who who's really stepping up and doing that kind of thing? And that's one of the things that we kind of lack here that we want to kind of look into creating going forward.

So, skills as well.

Uh we have a lieutenant, but it would when I say captain, there's you could call it a lieutenant, you could call it you call whatever. So we have one lieutenant right now. And the only reason we have that position is because they uh created that for the person who runs all the EMS. It was just like a they really don't operate as an officer. They operate as a person who just has an extra job and that was just a way to find a way to pay them to do that extra job. But they don't actually offer operate as an officer. Yes, there would be three positions that would be at that pay scale of 10. Let's see. Okay. Uh partnership with town council. So, you know, I'm trying to learn kind of the budget. I'm kind of going through the details of kind of learning how it put together. Lance left me with a very good um a lot of information. So I have a lot of information I can go through and see why things were done the way they were, breaking it down into the the smallest aspects of each part. So it's been really good to be able to go through, but I'm still in that learning process. So kind of working on that, but it's one of the things with the town council to work on is kind of long-term capital planning. What are the needs of the Cicero fire department and the town of Cicero for fire protection? Going to that um policy alignment is one of the things I think is kind of strange to me because we don't have any language specifically for the fire department as far as policies. It's a um everything is through the employee handbook. Well, a lot of things in the employee handbook may not address fire department specific issues. So, there's a lot of issues that I we're kind of going through to figure out are they addressed in the handbook? If not, we need to actually be able to write those down and say this is a fire department policy because police and fire are always held to a completely different standard than the rest of the town employees or city employees. That's always an issue. We have a, you know, dealing with the public. There's an expectation that we, you know, operate a certain way. We talk to people a certain way, you know, things of that nature. And how do we how do we deal with the

public and things like that. So that's just one of the things we're kind of like talking about is are there things that we need to address about the fire department specifically in language of how do we deal with the employees on the department. And then the last one continued leadership collaboration. Um like I said I really been had a good experience with you guys working with you. You guys have been easy to work with and I just want to continue that. All right the next part. So we get into kind of fiscal challenges what we deal with and you guys I think you guys all know this. I think this is the been talked about for years. So we talk about competitive pay, medic, and longevity pay. Those are the three biggest things that I say come up and that we will have challenges with going in the future. There's a chart on there for you to look at, but it just kind of compares. The yellow is who my concern is we lose people to. We're the red. The green are the people we can pull from. And a couple of them fell off. I'm not sure why they got cut off, but there's a couple more departments to the north of us that we could actually lateral from. But the concern is we also are the lateral targets for the yellow above. So you can kind of see. So the way that breaks out that's uh base salary longevity and then that's how pension bases figured. You add those two together and that's how the state calculates your pension. It's a your 20-year pay plus your 20-year longevity pay. And you can just kind of see the differences. So that's just for you guys to kind of go through and look at and have an understanding of kind of what we're dealing with and competing with the competitive market. Uh the next one, competitive pay. So competitive, we're we're competing with all of central Indiana for limited trained firefighters and medics. So um it's very hard and we currently can't afford to train new firefighters because of the cost of putting somebody through an academy. We don't have the resource to do that. So we're relying on laterals currently. Um one thing we deal are dealing with right now, we talked about this in a previous meeting, our eight paramedics do not have any kind of um stipen for being a paramedic.

If you look around us, I think we're the only uh department within, you know, an hour of us that have paramedics that don't have a stipen. So, that's something that probably needs to be discussed. One of the suggestions I have is at the end of the year, we look at what happens with the increased ambulance billing and see if that's a possibility to use some of that money to create a paramedic stipend going forward. But internally, that's a big issue we're dealing with of, you know, it's to 105 to $12,000 paramedic stipen highend to medium. I mean, we're pretty much at the 5,000's about the bottom of the thing. So, it's something to be aware of and to note exists and it's something we really need to talk about because it's crucial for retention. We don't want to lose our paramedics. We don't want our paramedics to give up their license. So, I said, if I don't get anything extra for it, why do I need it? That's something we need to make sure doesn't happen. We need to make sure that we keep our paramedics. They're very crucial to our operation and they're very hard to find and replace. if we would lose one and things I've seen. So these are things that we're going to be talking about probably for a while that um that's like future discussions I think that probably are going to be had whether you know central fire department versus a district versus a territory. That's an ongoing discussion I think is going to be happening for a while. I feel like there are very strong bones to this area. Uh you guys have a very good department right now. It does its job very well. it only limitations are, you know, staffing and equipment and things of that nature, but it's all high dollar things. It's all money. So, everything comes down to money when it comes to fire departments. And that's not unique to CSRO. That's every fire department everywhere, every city, every township deals with that at some point in time. Uh, pace of growth is something that we really have to be on top of to make sure we keep up with response to the pace of growth that are going to happen in this area. Um, water and hydrants are going to make a huge difference for us in this town. It that provides us so much more

ability to do our job when water pressure is good in the hydrants and we can get more access to water in more areas as I as we grow here. Uh, techn technical rescue capabilities. Like I said before, we're really going to push that. We're going to really get to the point where especially water like swift water and static water. You know, I want our people to be comfortable in the water. If we have to go out and do a rescue in the water, we want to make sure compent, capable of doing those rescues. And then the last thing on there is administrative positions. That's something that's been talked about for a while. I know it's been the budget several years, but that's something that at some point probably really needs to we need to have a long discussion about what would that look like to have a second administrative position on the fire department, the second day job. And what that does is that helps us with the earlier problem of all of our battalion chiefs are so tied up in administrative work, they're not they don't have the time to do the fire stuff that they're supposed to be doing. So, a lot of these are things that I see coming down the road or things that we're currently dealing with, but they're going to be long-term discussions, long-term issues. You know, we're not going to solve any of these problems in a couple meetings. This is stuff we have to talk about for a long period of time and get to that. And then our commitment to Cicero, you know, we provide professionalism. We want to be prepared. We want to be accountable. And we want to be forward thinking in our leadership. And our leadership doesn't include me. Just include me. Leadership is all the way to the bottom. The first last hired. They are involved in leadership. We want their opinion. We want to know what they think. We want to know what they need, what they see. You know, they're fire departments get very stagnant. They only care about what the people at the top think. And if you don't take into consideration the people at the bottom, when I say bottom, I don't mean that derogatory. It's just the hierarchy of the department. They have a different viewpoint than we have. You know, I've been in the fire service 26 years. I see things differently than a guy who's been there for one or two years. They have a different perspective. So really listening and considering them leaders of moving the department forward. Everybody has a position of leadership

on the fire department and they they all can use it in their current position wherever they are. So really pushing that and getting them to think and be confident to speak up is something we're really pushing and want to see happen. And that's all I have on here for that part. Uh, one thing I did want we I talk about so I know we had talked about it earlier but I've been putting it together. So part of the idea of how we would staff the department I'm going to put a bunch of models together but one of the issues we have I think uh Rhonda we I think uh Suzanne was asking about this with talking to Lisa about this. We have we need to get you all the information for the money that wasn't in gateway get the how how do we go about doing that? I think it's more of a question than a

No, no, no. So we didn't have the that you put the budget in early. We don't have the whole budget in the gateway. How do we

Okay, perfect. Y that answers it. Okay. Yeah, that's easy enough. Perfect. Um any questions you guys have for me Chris of your challenges? Yep. looking forward addressing weaknesses. Uh would you have an order of the top three most important of the weaknesses on the weakness part? Yes. Um I would say I know you've got a sheet here that talks about

No, no. I would say absolutely staffing is number one. So the sheet so that's one thing I want to tell you guys. So the sheet that's in there that shows all the listing of ours, we're very hodge podge in hours. So, for example, we have a lot of people who we all shift change at 7 o'clock. So, we have a person who works for us a lot. We have several people who work for us a lot who get off at 7 o'clock from their job also. So, we have a firefighter specifically that works for Indianapolis Fire Department. And when that firefighter gets off work, they will come here and like work the second 12, but they have to leave at 5 in the morning to go to Indianapolis to work their actual job. So, they'll take off from here at 5. So, we have a two-hour gap every morning when that person works. We have a lot of the opposite where a person who's coming in to fill a show for us gets off at 7 o'clock and they may not make it to us until 9:00. So, we just have those weird holes all over the time. And then a lot of times, you know, we'll have a day where somebody's like, "Hey, I can come in and work from midnight to 7:00, but I can't get there till then or I can work from 10:00 to 7:00." So, we're not we're struggling with filling that full 12 hours or 24 hours. and and we could we could make a policy and say, "Hey, you know, you have to work the whole 12 or the whole 24, but then we wouldn't have anybody." So, the nature of the part-time people gives us that. So, one thing we're working on is trying to really identify when that happens and see if our people who are leaving in the morning can stay over and bridge that gap for an hour or two or come in a little bit early and bridge that gap. So, that's one conversation we're having right now. How do we do that? How do we fix those problems? But like I said, you know, you can see if you look down that list of hours, they're all over the place. I mean, you'll have one day we had five shore, one day we have four, some days we have one shore, some days it's 24 shore, some days it's 24 and then another eight. You know, it's it's all over the place. So, that just is the nature of part-time staffing of you just have to do take what you can get because they're doing a second job for you to help fill your spots. So, um that's one of the that's the thing. I mean like to me the biggest the biggest issue I deal with is scheduling and the biggest fix

for that is if we can show that it's cheaper to hire three people versus paying all this overtime and part-time that gives us consistency and if we can do it for the same amount of money I think it's a net win for everybody. How soon do you think you'll have that information?

Uh I just started on it about two weeks ago and I'm doing a bunch of comparison. I'm trying to I'm getting all the information about like what's our average sick leave. So we don't use a lot of sick leave. Our department I would say is pretty good as sick leave. If somebody gets hurt, that's a whole another story. But just calling in sick, I don't feel like we use a lot of it. Um, so we're kind of compiling that information. It comes down to military. So we have our hours and we have 48 a day we're not filling. And then we have add vacation time in there, add sick time in there, add military time in there. If we have to send anybody away for a day to train on a day that we work, if there's a class we need them to go to, little things like that go in. But the this the where I'm at right now is what I'm showing is and these are very high-end numbers I'm putting in. I'm putting in like the worst case scenarios in these numbers. I think with the budget we have currently in there. If we hired three people and this this isn't going to be for part of the year. So it's going to be a little skewed because it would be like maybe a six months we would have this. If we would do this for a whole year, I see it saves us about $113,000 minus what I haven't put in there. sick time and sick time I'm calculating it I think it's around sick time military time out combined I think is about $40,000 maybe so I think is as a group as a whole I think we're actually would save money by doing that but the the kicker to it is we're so small that if we lose one person it's devastating to us we lose two people like with injuries like some if we had a fire where a couple guys got hurt we had two firefighters hurt and they had an injury where they had to be off three or four months that's devastating to our staffing you know, with the way we are, adding more people helps that and then it gives us the opportunity to fill. So, you know, I'm at the point right now where there's a couple days where I'm going to come in and work 24-hour shifts just because we're so short that day. You know, like we have days where we're starting the day with three and nobody else is available. All our part- timerrs are tied up, they're working, or they have other commitments and our other people, our people, actual people don't aren't able to work that day. So, we have, you know, it's always juggling

that around. So, that's that by far is our biggest issue. that we deal with. And the other thing I would the thing I would say is probably second is administrative capacity. Our ability to do administrative work because we pull so much time from our fire chiefs who are line chiefs who should be focusing on fire to do administrative jobs. That's probably number two. And then apparatus is three because I'm always afraid apparatus is going to break, you know, and if it does, you know, we have to figure that out. It's going to be a scramble to figure it out, but that's just part of running a fire department. But I would say of that list, I would say those are the three. And really, that's the three that are on there.

So, one or two are kind of competing against each other. Uh I would say one one is way ahead. Two is a second. Yeah. Well, if you take people Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you pull and then you're additional people, right, it's another firefighter. Yeah. It's adding a whole another position. Yeah. So, it is Yeah, it is. It all it all it all competes with itself. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, those are the those are the issues. And like I said, the the unfilled hours, you can see they got a little bit better, but I also feel like we're in the the non- vacation season, so nobody's gone just yet. So, once vacation starts hitting and we start actually having people off a lot more, then we start fighting that unfilled hours a lot more. So, if you had three people, what would you do? You put per each shift.

Yeah, we would. So, we have six positions a day that would fill five with full-time people and then we would have one all every day we would have one to fill with either overtime or PRN and then vacation. Then then the other one is filling vacation. So, we'd have fill vacation, sick time, anything like that that comes up would be the rest of what we would have to fill. I think I went through all the numbers that you gave me Rhonda and it looks to me like it's about the total cost package for a new firefighter if they came in as a lateral with five years of experience on pay and all that stuff puts up about $124,000 roughly adding the FICA and all the other things into what we have to pay on clothing then things of that nature. So it's about that much. So you're looking at $372,000 roughly is what the cost of three firefighters is because there's health insurance. There is um PEF things like that going to those two those two alone are 23 or $43,000 probably. Right. 19,000 for PEF and then like 24 for insurance.

21 Oh, that's right. Perf went up this year. That's right. insurance, right? Yeah. You guys kind of you just have like an average budgeting number, I think, is what I saw on there. You do it individually for each. Okay. I think in the budgeting that I have, it's broken down to an average number. Yeah. What are we doing with the fire truck in the back? I am trying to get somebody to buy it. I'm assuming it was winterized.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it works fine. You go out there and start it up. It works great. Okay. Yeah. The biggest thing with that truck is getting the water out of it. That's winterizing a firet truck is getting every drop of water, all the valves open, make sure there's no water left inside of it. So, um, I've been looking at different sites that offer options. We did this with a couple trucks that I had before when I was chief before. Um, I assume you guys operate same way. Anything that goes up for sale has to be put up for auction or several bids put in. Is there a bid process?

So, a lot of these companies that buy fire trucks, they'll offer you something, but they'll you can negotiate with them determ. So they're pretty good about they don't backdoor you. They don't come in and say, "Hey, well, we told you to give you 80, but nobody else has been, so we're going to offer four." You know, they've I've had good luck with companies do. So reach out. The problem is the age because that's an older truck. And there is there are age limits of what they usually will buy. You just have to find somebody who's looking for a truck like that. So I mean, you're concerned about maintenance, mechanical issues with old trucks. So maybe three old trucks is better than Well, I mean

that truck that truck is so old that it's not even like functionally usable for what we do. I mean, we could use it maybe to pump water, but the rest of it is just I wouldn't put anybody up in that ladder with the age of that truck. It's been hasn't been used for a while and it's just they all will tell you they were not nobody would really like to get up in that truck the way it was. That truck is very sketchy, I would say, for what it is. So you talked about cat system as well. I thought we paid extra money system, but it sounds like we switched to the new that's all through the county. We all that all comes from them.

Oh, no. No. We get reimbured for that. that that that $6,000 the county pays us back for it. That's just we have to pay it up front then they reimburse. It was for our first due which is our inspection software. Did that just come up in the last like just recently, right? In the last couple pages last year where we paid extra for keeping the old county was going to the new system or something.

Oh yeah. So they they went through that whole process. So there's a kind of a competing interest on who likes what in the county for the different municipalities. So they've come up with an agreement that the part that we actually use a first do which is the software they're going to cover that portion of what we use. They're not covering the whole product which is dispatch and reporting and all that. They're just covering the inspection part which we do. So, we paid that up front and then they're going to reimburse us for