City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, everyone, let's get settled in and we'll get the meeting started. I'm sorry, I made the baby cry, I think. All right, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Public Safety Committee meeting for Tuesday, September 1st. I'll call the meeting to order. First item of business is the approval of the June 2nd, 2026 minutes. Do I have a motion? Okay, motion is second. Any changes, amendments to it? All in favor say aye. Aye. All right, any nays? Seeing none, they pass. Next up, we have the fire department, Fort Worth Lab, telling us about recommended changes to the fire and EMS fees. Chief, you want to start off with that?

Good morning, Public Safety Committee. James Horton, your interim fire chief. We will give a quick update on, I'm here for the fire and EMS update and to talk about some proposed fees that we have for the FY27 budget. We'll start off with just a couple overview of where EMS is today and then we'll get into the fee changes that we propose. Over the last year, this last fiscal year, for hiring and retention, we have hired 114 EMTs and paramedics. through two recruit classes. Our pass rates have been very high in those classes, 99 and 95% respectively. The national average is only 65 to 75%. Fort Worth Fire Department has a long history of exceeding that average. Our attrition rate is currently 20%. We lost 85 employees in that same time that we hired 114. That number is higher than we would like it to be. That's the same number approximately that was at MedStar across a calendar or fiscal year. We are taking steps to improve retention. We're currently working with city management through the collective bargaining agreement and hopefully have some other strategies in place to retain employees. One of those is doing our own in-house paramedic school. We're partnering with Tarrant County College plan to start that in january so some of our emts will be able to attend that full time across nine or ten months so basically grow our own paramedics and and keep them employed so that 85 employees you know really comes out to about seven to eight people a month and about three and a half of those are paramedics that we're losing there is a paramedic shortage nationally so we really want to place emphasis on that. And the vast majority of those are going to dual role departments, other dual role fire departments in either a single role capacity or going on to be firefighter EMTs and paramedics. So we are cognizant of that and we are taking steps to improve our retention in those areas. With that, we're gonna start recruiting again in the fall. We have our final group from the last test we gave this current fiscal year starting in October. We will have 25 EMT candidates and we will have eight lateral paramedic candidates start October 1. That'll finish up all of those lists. And then throughout the fall, we will go into a recruiting campaign. Fort Worth is, once again, we'll be able to host the state EMS conference here at our convention center in November, close to Thanksgiving. So we always do a lot of recruitment there. And then we're planning a hiring test shortly after that in January to kick off all of our FY27 classes. It costs us about $2.3 million per recruit class of 50 persons to hire those, and we're planning for two recruit classes in FY27. Ideally, if we can get our retention numbers up, we can get that down to one recruit class a year, which is currently what we do for firefighters through their attrition, which is mostly retirement. Warren staff, where we are today, even with those 114 and those leaving, as of July 1st, we were doing this as a quarterly closeout. Of our 543 sworn positions, we have 507 of those filled, so we're about 93% staffed. That number's gone up slightly since July 1st. We have about 45 openings, but we are starting those approximately 33 people October 1st to offset some of that to buy us a little bit of time till we can do the recruiting in the fall and get to the tests in January. and then start the FY27 hiring and recruitment. Our system performance, We primarily look at travel times and unit hour utilization, which is how busy a crew is during their shift. The goal is to be less than 50% unit hour utilization. MedStar, when they were running the EMS service, they were a high utilization system. They were up around 67% or 70%. We wanted to get that number down. We believe that contributes to some of the attrition, too, and burnout within that. Our goal is to be less than 50%. At the end of quarter three for FY26, we were at 36%. So we're still hovering around that 36 to 40% for unit hour utilization. We did go to 24 hour shifts, which I'll talk about in just a second, to make better use of our limited personnel. So because they're working a longer shift, we also wanna keep that utilization down. so that we don't have any medical errors or any problems with them being excessively tired while performing life-saving care. So we try to keep that in, if we can keep that in that 35% range is where we're looking at. And you see that sharp drop there is when we went to the 24-48 shift. So because we had limited people, by putting them on a similar shift to what our firefighters were working with 24 on, 48 off, we were better able to make use of our limited people. They have some more built-in overtime, but that not only dropped our utilization, but it also dropped our travel times. So we can see that when we made that change, we went down to at the end of quarter three, our emergent travel time was eight minutes and 55 seconds. Our stated goal for the city is to have a travel time of eight minutes, 90% of the time. So we're very close to that. As it got hotter in July and August, and we've had these 100 degree days, we're now hovering just above nine minutes on that. We're having more calls per day. But we do have 20 people in training, so we still have more people to put out to get more ambulances on the street to keep that down. And I think it is an achievable goal that we'll see an emergent travel time of eight minutes, 90% of the time. On the non-emergent side, the same thing. When we went to the shift change, we see a drop. A stated goal is 11 minutes, 90% of the time. At the end of last quarter, we were at 11.44. We're back around 12 minutes right now. Again, with all these 100 degree temperature days, calls are up. There's more There's more demand in the system, and we're doing everything we can to get more trucks on the street. Currently, we're running about 14,000 calls per month. That's a little bit up from what MedStar was running. They were at 12,600. We expect volume to increase every year. This has split out the gold bars, the emergent. So we basically have emergent versus non-emergent or ALS versus BLS. This is kind of our mix in the system. When we staff our ambulances, we run a tiered system. So we look at the ALS demand and the BLS demand or the emergent versus non-emergent to see how many ambulances and how many paramedics we need staffed on the street every single day. So the way all this kind of goes together is we have our demand that drives our workload. Again, we look at that demand, we look at how many units we need on the street to keep our workload less than the .5 unit hour utilization, and we continue to look at our response times on a weekly basis. Obviously, on a weekly basis, we can't see a general trend, but when we look at it quarterly or monthly, we can look at those trends and we can make adjustments to the system. We did pilot a program in the Lancaster corridor that started I guess a week or week and a half ago to do some alternatives down there so we don't have so many ambulances in there so we can keep the ambulances available for the emergent calls in the system. We continue to use RightSight, a telehealth system at dispatch and it's now available in the field for our ambulance crews. So we're looking at various alternate delivery models so that we can keep our ambulances on the street and available for emergent calls without having to just hire more people and keep throwing more people and resources at it. So we are looking at those alternative delivery models. We're often questioned, are things better today than they were before? So this is kind of a comparison slide. We have the MedStar overall times for each dispatch, the turnout, the travel. and the total response time versus where we are today. These were numbers that were previously provided by Fitch and Associates when they reviewed the EMS system, as well as just prior to that, we had CityGate and Associates also verify these numbers. The dispatch times were up a little bit on our dispatch processing time. We continue to work to get that down. We did bring two organizations together for dispatch at the Altamira facility. We also started using the medical priority dispatch system. So there was a little bit of a learning curve for our crews to get used to using that medical priority dispatch. So we continue to work on improving our processing times. Turnout times did go up. The turnout times are very low at MedStar because, quite frankly, they were sitting in an ambulance their entire shift at whatever street corner or gas station they were assigned to. They're now in the stations, they're now working a 24-hour shift. So the turnout times did go up a little bit. Our stated goal is 60 seconds for turnout time, so we're gonna continue to work to make improvements there. Our travel times are down significantly. But even with all of that, you see our overall response time on emergent calls is still down by approximately two minutes. And on non-emergency calls, we're down approximately five minutes at the 90th percentile response for those. So we do believe we've made great strides in system improvement and providing services to the citizens of Fort Worth. Before we get into the fees, I'll leave it there. Are there any questions about system performance or any of those slides? Elizabeth?

I've got some. Back on slide four, and you don't have to go back in that presentation. When you talked about planning two new recruit classes, how many, what's the maximum number of recruits we can get through each class?

Generally 50 is what we like to see just because we have certain, we have to break them out for skills. We also have seating capacity in the classrooms So we try not to do more than 50 in a class.

Okay, so the class that we have starting October 1 is 25, so that's about half full.

Right.

Is there a reason why we didn't wait fill that up or why it's not full?

Sure. We used, we exhausted all of the people we had waiting on any other list so they didn't make it into the previous class that we just did the graduation for a few weeks ago. We had people left over on those lists. We've completely exhausted all those lists. We don't have any more people in waiting, if you will. So we have to give a whole new entrance exam, a whole new interview process, all of those things that take time to do. So they would have had to wait until we give that test in January. We probably won't do a class till May. So we thought it was better to go ahead and get this group started in October, finish up all those lists. We also, the lists are only good for one year, and we had some people coming to the end of that one year. So we needed to get that class started in October.

It was just like a tail end of the list.

It's the tail end of everything. Every active list we have will be finished up as of that October start date. And then we will move on to a new round of processing.

Okay. That makes sense. And then... We talked about change, you talked about changing their schedule to the 2448, so it's in alignment with the firefighters as well. When we get fully staffed on EMTs and paramedics, do you anticipate that schedule changing or do you anticipate it remaining the 2448?

Our plan is to move it out to a 24-72. That's more common in the EMS industry because of the higher unit hour utilizations. When they go on a call and they transport to the hospital, typically the turnaround time for all of that is around 65 minutes. So depending on how many calls they run, it's about an hour per call. So our goal has been to move them out to a 24-72 for those that stay on a 24-hour shift, which is more common in the EMS arena.

What do you mean for those that stay on the 24-hour shift?

We will still have some peak demand units that are working 12-hour shifts because we don't have the same demand 24 hours a day. So we're busier from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. So we have 12-hour shifts that are peak demand units that we bring in and scale up to approximately 60 units on the street. And then overnight, 2 or 3 a.m., we only need about 40 units out in the system. So that allows us to be more economically efficient to do that demand staffing.

And is that demand stat? So those folks work what kind of schedule?

The 12-hour shifts will work four days one week, three days the next. They work an average of 44 hours per week on the 12-hour schedule.

And then for those now, the EMS workers are working how many hours a week?

Right now on a 24-48, if they're on that schedule, it's an average of 56 hours a week. They have some additional overtime built into that.

And then when they go to the 48-72, how many hours a week is that going to be?

24-72 is an average of a 42-hour work week.

Okay. Are we preparing them for, you know, they've gotten accustomed to working these additional hours and additional overtime?

We are. I mean, they know they're getting additional overtime, but our goal is to... have a schedule that has an adequate work-life balance. Okay.

And I think I had one more. Hang on a second. Oh, yeah. Can you tell me why we have so many more incidents? We have about 2,000 more incidents per month than MedStar. Do we know why we have such a increase over, because it's the same, it's roughly the same service area.

Well, that's from fiscal year 22, 23, and we're currently in fiscal year 26. I think Fitch said the system would have about 9% growth. We're currently looking at the growth of the system now and doing some demand analysis for the next fiscal year, but I think that's just normal system growth. I don't think that's anything new. I don't know if it adds up to the right percentage or not, but I would say that's expected system growth.

Okay, all right, those are my questions.

All right, thank you. Mia, Michael, any questions? All right, I have one, Chief. I'm curious, coming from the time you and I served on the MedStar board, we were talking about, you know, tiered approach to ALS and BLS. Currently, right now, as it stands, what is our current call volume distribution between ALS and BLS?

I'd have to get that number for you specifically. I don't know that, I can't say that every emergent call is ALS, but I would say that this is about our mix, our ratio, but we would have to get you what that actual percentage is. The medical priority dispatch is really set up that, it's supposed to be set up that 50% of your calls are emergent versus non-emergent. We do work with Dr. Jarvis, I know he's here in the audience, with the Office of the Medical Director. If we see a lot of calls that don't require ALS or they don't require transport, we look at different response packages for those. We do some of that, but I'd have to get you some specifics on our ALS, BLS mix, and we can find that out for you.

All right, that's all right. Thank you, sir. I guess you had more in your presentation to continue. Yes, sir. Please.

Okay, so the next part of our presentation gets into the recommended fees from the fire department as part of the FY27 budget process. So we have four things to bring in front of you today for discussion. The first is a 5% increase to permits and inspection fees within the Bureau of Inspections. That is really just kind of a standard year over year increase. in conjunction with development. It's already been through the Development Advisory Committee. I believe development is also raising their fees 5%, and that's just sort of the cost of doing business as wages increase with the contract and some of those kind of things. That keeps up with the market, so that 5% increase. It did go through the Development Advisory Committee. There were no comments about that, so it has been at least through some process. We also have a lift assist fee that we've talked about. We've given you a informal report on lift assist and there was some indication that we wanted to consider a lift assist fee at institutions that may be calling us on a regular basis. We are also looking at a increase to our special events rates of either a standard 5% or a higher percentage increase to be more in line with some actual cost recovery. And then the final thing is our EMS rates and looking at a 2% increase in line with what we're allowed to do through some state legislation, and we'll talk about that when we get there. So the lift assist fee applies to non-emergency responses at licensed care facilities only. It does not apply to any residential addresses. We're not gonna bill our citizens for this. It would only be licensed care facilities. Basically why we're doing this, it preserves our units on the street, reduces some non-emergent type calls that we do. It shifts the financial burden back to these private facilities. They may not have adequate staff at night to lift people up or do those kind of things. It's really their job to take care of that, not ours to supplement them. And then it also provides some reduction to responder injury risk, back injuries, those kind of things, which is often why they might be calling us so that they don't have back injuries with their employees.

As far as those facilities, it's also a question of them having the not just available personnel, right,

hiring any personnel that are you know physically suited to help yes sir right yeah and that should be their decision not we shouldn't be supplementing them for that if they don't have the adequate staff or and it's not just staff there's a variety of different medical devices that can help people lift and do all those kind of things hospitals have a lot of different There's other avenues to do. It's just up to them to do that, but we're kind of the easy button. Well, we'll just call 911 and have four firefighters show up and take care of this for us. So this is really, the lift assist is not anything that we expect to solve any of our budget problems, but we're just trying to change the behavior of those facilities that are using us and hitting the easy button and calling us out. So we really wanna set a fee that discourages that behavior and lets them take care of it. or if they're going to keep doing that, then there will be some financial gain on our part.

It's a reasonable expectation of those facilities.

So when we came up with the recommended fee, right now FIRE is proposing approximately $750 as our minimum. When we looked at that number, if you were to take our operating budget plus the amount we get in tax notes for apparatus, our budget comes out to be about $240 million, with our FIRE incidents around $120,000. $123,000 per year, it's approximately $1,900 per incident. If we look on a unit response-based cost of the cost of the personnel, the cost of the actual ambulance, it's about $576 per hour for those two people. If we send a crew of four firefighters, it rounds out to about $1,339 per hour for that. You see kind of the sliding scale there from zero to the 1,957. In looking at other agencies, we've got another slide coming up. We really haven't seen anything above $1,000 as a flat fee for that. And generally what we've seen when other agencies implement this is they see about a 60% reduction in these type of calls. So again, this isn't anything that is gonna solve any budget problems for us. We're just trying to change some behavior. When we look at what other places are charging for the information we could find, we've got Mesquite Fire at $500 flat fee per call. Longview is $250 for the second call. We could implement some kind of tiered system, but we have to keep up. There's a little bit of administrative burden with keeping up. third time this month or third time in six months, versus it looks like most everybody else just does a flat fee. So in looking at kind of what was out there generally and generally what our costs were for that, the fire department came up with a proposal of $750 for a flat fee for these lift assist calls at institutions only. Next thing we have. I think we have a question right here. Go ahead, Dr. Faulkner.

Thank you, Mayor Perkinson. Chief, so I see that you're comparative agencies, but as compared to Arlington's and the other large metropolitan cities like our own, did you have therapy?

We did not. It's kind of a new thing still. In the fire service, there's not a lot of other places doing that. I don't believe Arlington, we looked at like Grand Prairie, Plano, some of those agencies haven't done it. They may charge for other things like motor vehicle accident cleanups or some of those type of things, but we didn't see a whole lot in that area. Arlington specifically contracts with AMR Ambulance to do their EMS, so they're a little different than we are, but this is what staff found when they did kind of cast a wide net to see what other places were doing.

So the lift assist fee is, I want to characterize it for you, is it a new practice amongst agencies or departments? I'd say it's relatively new. Okay, thank you. Yes, ma'am.

On our standby and event fees, with the merger of MedStar, our standby events increased exponentially. We were already doing a lot of standby events. They were doing a lot of standby events. Dickie's Arena has taken off, so we're pretty much busy there every weekend. There's just a lot going on in the city, especially post-COVID. So we needed to update our costs for those. As we looked at that, we kind of have a standard 5% increase. And then we also looked at what is a better cost recovery amount based on what we were charging. And really, when we started the standby events years and years ago, 20 or 30 years ago, it was kind of, well, what does a firefighter get paid? We'll just take their average hourly overtime rate, and that's what we'll charge. But we're doing more of it. We've got more of a mix of personnel. Salaries and wages have increased. So in doing that, we figured, we came to the conclusion we were upside down on standby and event fees for what we were providing. So staff gave two options. One is a 5% increase just to do a little bit more cost recovery. And then if we look at a more aggressive cost recovery rate that takes more into account of the pay rate, the benefits, some equipment and supply costs, and overhead costs for invoicing and the things that we need to do that are associated with the standby events, we come up with about an average 66% increase. Even with that dollar amount, in looking at what other places are charging for standby events, staff said that these are not out of line with what's getting charged elsewhere. So it's not gonna price us out of the market. I would also mention that the vendors have a choice. So we have kind of different tiers. So the city has its own outdoor permits system for when you have to get an outdoor permit. As far as EMS standby goes, if it's less than 2,000 persons at that event, the vendor doesn't have to provide anything. If it's 2,000 to 4,000 people, The vendor can choose their own EMS agency. They can get a permit from us. That permit costs $100 for a group to provide EMS standby. We only get involved when the event exceeds 4,000 persons. We have to have somebody there. And then we will work with the partner venues as far as what is required there. But up to 4,000 people, they can really use. If they don't want to use us, they don't have to use us. And then once we get over 4,000, we start you know, working with the vendor, we have site plans, we have a lot of things, and then we get to the really large venues like Dickey's Arena, TCU Football, Texas Motor Speedway, that that 66% increase in some of those larger venues, that would make a difference for the number of events they're running, but by and large, most of our events are pretty small, and it wouldn't have much of an impact. We do have that there for your consideration, depending on what you want to do or what discussion you want to have.

Any questions over the options, board members? All right, roll.

Okay. And then we have our 2% EMS fee increase. So this is the amount that we charge for our transport fees. Senate Bill 916, which was passed in 2025, had to do with balance billing and truth in billing. The state legislature didn't want anybody to get any surprise ambulance bills or those kind of things. So Senate Bill 916 modified some of the health and safety code as well as the insurance code. And within that verbiage, it says that we, billing for ground ambulances, we're strictly limited to the lesser of two metrics. We can raise our rates by either the Medicare ambulance inflation factor or 10% of the previous year's rate, but we have to do the lesser of those two. I think in the history of the time that they've had the Medicare ambulance inflation factor, it's never gone above 10%. I think one year it was 8% following COVID. So we're pretty much limited to what the Medicare inflation factor is. For 2025, that was 2.4%. For 26, it was 2%. We're expecting it to be in the 2% range again for FY27. That comes from Medicare. It gets posted in November, so there's kind of a lag in when we get that. But once a year, we can notify the state, the Texas Department of Insurance that we're raising our rates, and we can only raise our transport rates by the lesser of those two numbers. So this is our one time a year to increase our rates. We didn't increase them last year. There's no increment that we can go back and capture later on. If we don't increase them this year, then we have to wait for the next year and we can only increase it by the inflation factor.

That's just saying it's time to wrap it up.

Okay, I'll go quicker, sorry. I know I've got a whole bunch of people behind me waiting. They didn't know what they were gonna get today for EMS fees, but here we are. Just to give you some indication of what that 2% would do as far as our budget, looking at our payer mix, this pie chart's a little busy, but the short version is that approximately 50% of our transports are for Medicare and Medicaid, and those rates are capped by what Medicare and Medicaid pay. So that 2% is not gonna change that because they have a pay schedule that they already pay. Overall, of all of our transports, we only collect about 28% of what we bill for that. And that is in line with national standards. We can break it down by different payers if you'd like. But overall, it's about 28% total that we take in from our billing. When we look at what our current fees are, you'll see the current fee column there in the middle of what those are. Those are our currently published rates. And then we have our recommended fee with what that 2% increase would look like. And then finally, because that 2% increase is not gonna change the 50% of Medicare and Medicaid, it's only gonna affect the private insurers, the private pays. uh really it's going to only bring in approximately 162 000 additional revenue to the ems side of all of this when we talk about that but it is our one time a year to be able to increase our published rates with the state which is why we're bringing this before you today There's a timeline at the bottom there. So basically, October, the fiscal year begins. Medicare looks at the rates from June to June and then publishes the inflation factor in November. and the state adopts that, and then generally in December is when we can submit our new rates to Texas Department of Insurance, and they'll be published in April. It doesn't really align with our budget, but again, while the city's updating all their fees, we want to bring this to you now so that we can get it in with the rest of the group and let you know what we're doing with EMS. And that's the end of the presentation.

All right, any questions from the committee members? All right, there is one thing that I do need to, I guess circle back on, back to the options on page 16 in your presentation, Chief. Yes, sir. Even though it's not an action item per se, you do want some direction from us, given you, right, as far as what percentage range it would be in?

Yes, I believe, right, we would like some indication of what you're comfortable with.

Yeah, because as it stands right now, In reading the titles, option one's 5%, option two, 66%. I mean, that's a rather large range.

It is. We've gotten behind in our standby as far as our recovery, our cost recovery for doing that. So as we looked at what the true cost of providing those services were for personnel and benefits and those type of things, we found we were upside down.

Okay, well. What kind of position would you be in if we looked at somewhere in the middle of that range, say 20, 30%?

We're making it work now. Even with the 5% or the current rate, we do what we can to contain those costs and break even across that. We will just look at that. We standardize the resources we provide per thousand people, whether it's two EMS teams or four EMS teams. So we kinda have that standard and we don't deviate from that. But we do look at the mix of personnel that we provide. Do we need all paramedics? Do we need one paramedic ambulance? Can we do it with EMTs to try and make it work within the budget that we have? And we're just trying to do that as well as make it a neutral cost to the city when we provide those services.

All right, well, I think at this point, if we go around the table and get input from our committee members, it might be in order. Elizabeth, any thoughts on that? Where you might have a preference in planning?

We know what, my only concern is, and this is because District 9 has, I think, the lion's share of the events that'll be impacted by the increase in fees. And so, do we know what option two, what that looks like? Like the total percent increased? You see what I mean, like?

Option two is 66%.

It's a 66% increase. Right.

So we're suggesting something maybe less than that?

Yeah, I would think so, only because I think of the Mayfest, the Main Street Arts Festivals, the Michelada Festival, you know, the type of big events that we have downtown and in Trinity Park. And we want to cost recovery. I appreciate that. I also don't want to... prevent our partners from being able to host what are meaningful community events. Like I think of Arts Goggle, that's a volunteer run operation through Near South Side, and I think it would be cost prohibitive if we did option two. So I'm comfortable with option one. I understand that for budgeting purposes we might need to go up a little more, but I think we need to have a conversation with some of our partners that it's gonna impact the most.

Have any of those conversations that Councilwoman Beck is referring to, Chief, to your knowledge, have they occurred? Have we had any conversations with them?

We've talked to a couple of our larger venues, and they are waiting to see what happens because they need to, especially for those that have multi-events over multi-days or every weekend or something like that, then they need to do their budget for the next year and account for that. well to some extent as I understand it they do it's not really the venue that pays necessarily they they pass that on to the vendor or the artist or whatever to some extent but they do need to take that into account so they're kind of waiting to see what happens yeah I think that works for venues what I'm and I'm less concerned about the venues of the world as I am our our street fairs and

public venues because those are often put on by nonprofit organizations. They're not necessarily making a profit and so I have some trepidation about, I understand the need to balance and I want us to cost recovery but I don't want to put these events on ice because I think they're important to the city.

Yeah, we recognize them. Sorry, I think me too. Part of that trepidation might come from what is the cost going to actually be? What is the Michelada Festival going to go from $1,000 to $20,000? So that might be helpful for us to understand those metrics.

Yeah, I mean, if it's a difference between $1,000 and $1,500, I think most of these organizations can... can absorb that, but again, if it's a magnitude of we're going from what they're used to paying, maybe two grand and it's an order of 10, I think then we have some big problems.

We have our previous invoiced amount so we can go back and we can add, if these fees were done at whichever cost, we can provide that out for maybe what it would be for the last 12 months or some of those different vendors.

Yeah, if you could give an example of like what it would have cost. I know we gave Sundance Square a lot of support during World Cup or Mayfest Arts Goggle and Main Street Arts Festival. I think those are just kind of that come to the top of my head of like those, you know, big events.

Okay, we'll do that. We'll get you that this week.

All right, thank you.

Yes, ma'am. Okay, so if I'm hearing this correctly, and Dr. Hall, Before I say anything, do you want to give your input on that?

I thought we were going around the table, but Michael jumped in. Not a big deal. I can wait my turn. So I think my concern actually is kind of in line with my colleagues. I think mine kind of lands more with the smaller nonprofit or the smaller organizations. I don't want to deter people where they may have had a smaller event and they would pay for the standby services and now just kind of making it where they'd rather risk it and not have you there. Because they don't have to, I guess. So I am kind of curious as to why the option was 5% all the way to 66% and not something somewhere a little bit more, I don't know, closer to what you needed. I guess that's why I'm trying to understand the range for the option ones and two. Go ahead, sir.

I was going to say the option two is our cost recovery.

Okay.

Option one was a minimal 5% increase, and we were thinking that the committee could provide some guidance somewhere between that 5% and 66% on what the committee would be comfortable with. Guidance to staff.

Thank you for that. And so I would say to inform my decision-making, I would, to my point, To Councilman Crane's point, I would like to see what that cost looks like for a large-scale event. And I would like to also know, again, I'm always going to ask you comparatively what we are charging versus what other people are charging, just to have something more than a standard and then what we need to cover the cost of it.

We'll get you that. And again, for the smaller venues, if it's less than 2,000 people, they're not required to have EMS standby. If it's up to 4,000 people, they can use their own if they want to have another group provided because they think this is too much. So it's anything above 4,000 people. Now, conceptually, I can't tell you whether that's a full football stadium or whichever, but You know, less than 4,000, they have quite a few options. So ideally, this doesn't impact some of our smaller community organizations, parades, or those type of things, or, you know, a fundraising effort. But to Councilmember Beck's point about, you know, the Mayfest and some of those kind of things, We'll definitely get you, we'll get you some cost comparisons and we'll look at our previous invoicing and see what the new invoicing would have been.

Thank you.

Sounds like a good approach. One thing that I want to notate, we are not having a public safety meeting in October. So we would end up having to, you know, based on whatever you present to us, it would be in November, correct? Correct.

I think what we'll do is I'll check with city management, but we'll get you that information because I think at some part in the budget process, you're going to be voting on fees. I'm not exactly sure so that you can make that informed decision. This was kind of educating some of you on that to talk to your colleagues about, but we'll share that information with everybody so that when you do vote on fees or whatever that is in the budget process, make an informed decision.

Yeah, because of course on October 1st, FY27 begins. But what I'm understanding is we can make a decision like that and not necessarily- Christian probably knows more about the budget than I do. For the Public Safety Committee and do it in- No, no, I don't think so.

You are scheduled to adopt the fee ordinance on September 15th. So with the budget. So if you need more time for benchmarking or looking at this range, we would need to take these fees separate from the budget process. Our deadline for that is obviously before September 15th. So it'd really be like by maybe end of week, mid next week. So it just depends on your level of comfort with quickly evaluating.

Could we do an email approach? That is, could you send it to the committee members via email once you get that information, then have us opine? Would that be possible? Is that legal?

No.

Okay. I didn't suggest that we would confer. But separately, could we do that?

Okay.

What I'm being told by our legal counsel is that we do this as an IR at a council work session, correct? Okay. That all sound kosher? All right. Let's do it that way.

We'll get you an update on an IR then for an upcoming work session before the 15th.

Okay. All right. Unless we're right with legal, we're good. All right. Let's do it that way. Then we can abide by our timing as far as the implementation of that. Okay. Any other questions for Chief? Chief? Before you sit down, I just want to acknowledge this is, I guess, your first formal meeting.

It is. Thanks for being nice.

We didn't treat you too badly, but we appreciate you stepping up and welcome on board, Chief. I appreciate your support and trust. You've got a lot of great experience, and it's going to be a benefit to the department, so we appreciate you.

Thank you all very much. Thank you. What's that?

Just in. Hold on. Okay, just for further clarification, we were just informed that there is no work session, so then we can receive email communications, but individually, not as a group. So let's do it that way, staff. Clear? We'll do that. Okay, good.

We'll go through the Christiane's office and we'll get it sent out to everybody.

All right, thank you. All right, next up, we have Dr. Jarvis. you know, recognize care for patients experiencing cardiac arrest. Welcome, Dr. Jarvis.

Thank you. I'm Jeff Jarvis. I'm your EMS medical director. So the portion of the meeting you just went through would be sort of eating your veggies. So this is the dessert part where you get to see the fruits of what your EMS system is doing. I'd like to bring Allison Scanlon. Here she is. up to go through some of the successes we've had. One of the key things about improving our outcomes from cardiac arrest is really celebrating the successes when we have them. So, Allison.

Thank you, Dr. Jarvis. Today we are recognizing the dispatchers, firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics whose actions help patients survive cardiac arrest and leave the hospital to return to their families with good neurological function. Because it takes time to verify hospital outcomes, today's recognitions reflect cardiac arrest responses that occurred between April 1st and June 30th, 2026. Successful cardiac arrest begins long before the patient reaches the hospital. It starts with a dispatcher who quickly recognizes cardiac arrest, provides life-saving instructions, and helps bystanders begin CPR. It continues with first responders who deliver high-quality CPR, early defibrillation, and seamless teamwork. It is carried forward by EMTs and paramedics who provide advanced assessment, treatment, and coordinated transport. Every step matters and every person has a role. The patients we recognize today survived because each link in the chain worked together exactly when it was needed. Their outcomes reflect not only clinical experience, but also preparation, communication, and teamwork under extraordinary circumstances. During this three-month period, 21 members of our community survived cardiac arrest with good neurological outcomes because of the efforts of the people we are recognizing today. The crews and dispatchers involved were Fort Worth Fire Engine 1, Tower 1, Engine 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, Quint 13, Engine 14, Truck 14, Engine 7, Engine 19, 20, 23, 26, Quint 26, Engine 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, and 40, along with Forest Hill Fire Department and White Settlement Fire Department. Our ambulances were Fort Worth Fire Medics 6, 7, 10, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 95, and 97, The CCPs, or the critical care paramedics that arrived on scene, were Fort Worth Fire Medic 1, Supervisor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. The Fire Alarm Office telecommunicators involved were Telecommunicator Bonilla, Burns, Castro, Contreras, Diamond, Gaines, Ruska, Lee, Lucas, Maxwell, Schabke, Trujillo, and Washington. And then the public safety communicators involved were communicators Abram, Fowler, Harden, Horner, Huda, Jacobs, Mayer, Moore, Nims, Olvera, Pham, Pino, Scroggins, Tompkins, Trejo, and Valdez. And then your individual names can be found in the handout. As we celebrate these successes, it's worth remembering that no one saves a cardiac arrest patient alone. Survival is the product of the entire system working together. from dispatchers and first responders to EMS crews, hospital teams, and often the bystanders who are willing to step forward before we arrive. To everyone being recognized today, thank you for your professionalism, your commitment to excellence, and for making a lasting difference in the lives of the people we serve. At this time, I would like to invite those of you who are being recognized to come stand up here with me so that we can acknowledge your dedication and service. And on that note, I want to thank you all for everything you do for our community. And then as soon as we're done with this, we'll go outside and meet in the foyer to pass out individual certificates to everyone.

That's wonderful. You know, I know that I speak for our committee and, you know, conveying real appreciation to everything that you do on a daily basis, saving lives is something that should never be taken for granted. And we want to be able to supply you with the tools necessary to do your jobs and do them well for the sake of our public. So thank you very much.

Committee members, if you have anything to say, please feel welcome.

Elizabeth?

Yeah, so several years ago, I actually had the opportunity to watch y'all respond to a cardiac arrest in real time. I was eating lunch with a friend when a man went into cardiac arrest and Fort Worth Fire Department showed up at the time before MedStar. So I watched that big yellow contraption that you use that does chest compressions and later found out that that particular gentleman had a type of heart attack that only 2% of people survive. And so he survived because of y'all. So it was amazing to watch. So thank you for your continued service to the city of Fort Worth.

So this year, my mother-in-law has come to live with us. And so this year, we did have two medical emergencies. And so I recognize her face. I don't know if they recognize mine, but they came out to my home. And just experiencing those emergencies and anxiety and have lived a long adult life and never had to dial 911. I was very grateful for the staff that showed up, for the care that they rendered, and just the honest, candid communication on that second visit. So thank you so much for all the work that you do and very much appreciate it and want to be here to support you and to Carlos's point, make sure that you have everything that you need to continue to do the excellence that you deliver in our community every day. So thank you.

Michael. All right. Thanks again, everybody. Stay safe. We appreciate you.

Thank you.

The other thing that I would like to do is give you a broader picture. Those are 21 individuals who are still in the community that wouldn't have been had it not been for the efforts of the department. I'd like to give you a broader picture of how to your point about what we're doing here in Fort Worth compares with other places. So 2025, we annually validate numbers on an annual basis with a national organization called CARES. That's a registry for cardiac arrest. So what we're looking at here is numbers nationally 149,000 cardiac arrest versus 1100 here in the city of Fort Worth and the survival. So the patients that are most likely to survive a cardiac arrest are ones who arrest in with someone there to witness the arrest and who have a shock algorithm. That's up at the top and you'll see that our survival here, 44.6%, 45% versus 37%. This is the first year that we've been above the national survival level for 10, 15 years. Something that we're proud of. We're not content with that. We think we can do better. We're gonna continue to do better. If you look down through these lists, you'll notice that we are above national rates everywhere except for one, and that is public access AED, which are some of the things that we're working on to recruit our business community to help us get AEDs available for our citizens. So thank you all very much. I appreciate your support. Thank you, Dr. Jarvis.

Can I make a comment? Dr. Jarvis, I know we talked about this earlier in the year or last year, I don't even know when, but we talked about the ADUs. I know that you were doing efforts then and you highlighted or lifted that up just now. Have you all started more intentionally with trying to recruit the business community or are there any efforts or formalized efforts that you're taking right now to help improve that number?

Yes, ma'am. As a matter of fact, we have an IR coming up that will give you some more information about that. But it's absolutely a partnership with our business community that we're looking at to see how we can both work together to help our community.

Well, thank you. Congratulations on these numbers.

Thank you.

All right. We've already discussed about getting more of the cost information as it impacts organizations pertaining to option one and option two. of our event fees, so we're going to get that. Any other future agenda items? All right, seeing none. Everyone keep in mind, again, October public safety meeting for this committee is canceled. When is the November meeting? Does anyone know offhand? First Tuesday, right? Thank you, Jessica. Being told it's the 3rd, so November 3rd is the next public safety meeting for this committee. And with no other business in front of us, we are adjourned.