City Council - Regular Meeting

All right, you are broadcasting now. We are live. We're going to start the roundtable in about five minutes for anybody that might be online and listening in. I'd say if the group is small enough, maybe we consider bringing it in closer. That way the microphone will pick up more. I don't know. Okay.

Sounds good. But we don't necessarily have to. Yeah, probably. If you want me to, I can open it.

Thank you.

Thank you. Hi. Hi. Sorry, I just saw your text.

Did you?

I did respond.

Oh, okay.

I heard a little ding when I was in the car.

Thank you.

For anybody online, we'll start in five minutes.

I'm feeling it. The anchor is on the boarding board.

So she's going there. Anybody online, we'll start in four minutes. Shh.

Oh, you can talk. But you are being recorded if you're talking. There'll be record out there of anything you say, so talk nicely to your wives and your husbands.

The PD one is all turning into the fire department. We'll let you have one this year.

It'll be an inaugural one.

That's kind of the one that matters, isn't it?

Yeah, or the end one.

You're saying that the moment you guys win, you're going to quit and not do anymore?

I think we'll have a rough time.

I will begin in three minutes. The fire department has water at the back on the counter if some of the firemen themselves decided to pay for it to give everybody something to drink. So if you would like anything to drink, feel free to grab one.

Two minutes.

We'll begin in two minutes.

I'm doing that for the people that are online, in case they're logging in.

One minute. So, if we could go further.

Good evening, everybody.

Thank you for coming.

Tonight, I'm assuming all of you are aware that this event is Community Roundtable for Public Safety Fire Department.

We are broadcasting live, so everybody's aware.

I'm John O'Brien, I'm the city manager, and I want to thank all of you guys for coming. For the most part, you're going to be lucky enough not to hear a whole lot from me this evening, but what I would like to do is take the opportunity to say a couple of different things in regards to roundtables. These events are designed to be opportunities for conversation and education, but the community that comes and sits around the table, the questions you have are what's most important to us to make sure that we're answering versus us spending a lot of time hopefully not making you feel as though we're talking down to you in any way, shape, or form. We've held a plethora of different topics within the community, and we plan on holding a bunch more. In the near future, the two that I think I would like for everybody to make aware of that's coming up soon is on the 9th of September at 6 p.m. at the library will be Inside Your City Budget. And the intent of that conversation, we're doing some stuff on social media that's putting out small pieces of information to help educate leading up to it, But that evening, same event, a little bit of education up front with the opportunity to answer questions. And we're encouraging people to bring tough questions. The goal is to help you understand as best as you can all of the different functions, and that night's going to be about city budget. Behind that, we have a strategic plan that we've implemented within the city that we're calling the Fiscal Transformation Initiative. And I think we owe the community to make sure that they know and understand what it is we're doing and why. And so on the 17th of September, we'll be holding that roundtable as well. I'm going to hesitate right at this moment to say the exact location, but more information to follow on that. And we are advertising that on social media currently. Um, with that being said, uh, um, in the time that I've been in the city, I would like to think that I've made a lot of good decisions. Um, but in that time, I think the two best decisions that I've made since I've been here has been the opportunity to hire our police chief, Jason Hayes, who's at the back and, um, a stiff competition between the two. Um, the second decision, not second place, um, is, uh, chief. Merle Lacy into the fire chief position. So I'm really happy to have them on board and I'm really happy to turn it over to Merle Lacy to talk to you guys tonight. So thank you.

All right. Thanks everybody for coming to our department. This is our home for our crews and We enjoy what you guys have provided for us out in the community, and we just want to let you know a little bit about our story, what we do, and also give you an opportunity to tell us what you think a good fire department should be, and we'll have some questions and answers. question and answer session and also some questions that I want you guys to give us your honest feedback. So welcome. Water back in the back there if you need a water. Bathrooms right here, men, women down to the left. So just a few little things like that. So again, welcome. We're going to talk about our department a little bit and how we're connected to the community. Maybe. Every department has a mission, statement, and a vision. Ours is the mission of the Grand Fire Department is to protect the lives and property of the citizens we serve. We will achieve this by providing effective safety education, fair and balanced fire code enforcement, and professional and safe emergency response delivered with care and compassion. Our vision, be a responsive, forward-thinking organization Driven by purpose and pride, a unified team of highly trained, resilient, and empowered professionals committed to excellence, wellness, and our community. We want to be a trained, healthy, and proud workforce. And I'm happy to say, you know, these guys live it every day. They give it 100% for the community that we serve. So they're following that, and I'm proud of them every day. Here's your part. This is a round table. I want to hear from the community on what do you expect from your fire department? Anybody? Could be partners of ours, too. Put out the fires. Huh? Put out the fires. Put out the fires, yeah.

A quick response.

A quick response, yeah.

What else? Prevention education in schools.

Prevention education in schools. Yeah. Yeah. There's got to be more than that that you expect out of us.

Follow up on make sure all the inspections are done on the buildings and everything like that.

Yeah. So more fire prevention stuff. Yeah. Anything else you would expect out of a healthy, proud fire department?

Skilled.

skill yep make sure we're training make sure we're making sure our people are the best that are out there right yep anything else what about what emergency services are most important to you and your family i got one comment yeah previous question yeah

I was looking at going camping and trying to find, like, what are my restrictions and stuff. Sure. It's not really easy to find kind of current, you know, communicating the current, you know, state of what we're allowed to do and not do and making it easy to find information. Right. Okay. If that's not, I don't know that I've looked on your website, but it seemed like it was complicated.

We'd have to do it. I'd have to check for sure to make sure that we have something.

This general area that was...

Okay. Yeah. What else? What about what emergency services are most important to you and your family? Out of what we provide.

I like that you have EMT services in case something dramatic happens during a fire or otherwise, and also that you run the ambulance as well, which is very helpful for the community.

Yep, yep. Yeah, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we move forward in the program. What does good service from LGFD look like to you?

Quick response again.

Quick response, yeah. That's it. It's pretty, you know, what we do is fairly straightforward, right? And we'll talk about that a little bit more. But when you get there, you want those skilled people that are highly trained and know what they're doing, provide good service, be servants of our community, provide good service. What would you like to better understand about us?

I don't want to talk again. I like it when you put the different things that you're doing in the community because that gives us a better feeling of who you are and it just gives a great sense of community but also a trust as well because we know who you are, you know what I mean, in individuals and the things that you do. Right. Yeah, I like that a lot.

Yeah, very good. Very good. So as we go through these next few slides, think of those things, think of these questions, and I'm going to have some more as we move through here for you to answer. And when we start going through these, I think it will pop up some more questions and concerns or things you might be wanting to learn. So there are no right answers. Please tell us what matters to you. This is what a roundtable is about, right? Yep. No right answer? No right or wrong answers. Clarification.

Yeah, clarification.

Point of clarification. Yeah. So who we are and who we work with. We're the only, the county, Union County's only paid fire department. We do have a paid fire chief or two in the outlying rural agencies, but we cover the whole county. We work with all these partners. We work with, I see OTEC's in the room. We work with OTEC, Grand Ronde Hospital, Union County Sheriff's Office, the PD here in La Grande, Life Flight, ODF. We work with all these people, plus all these agencies, Elgin Rural, Imler, La Grande Rural, Cove, Union, and North Connor. All these are our partners that we work with. Depending on the call, where it is, what's going on, we respond there, we help them. Sometimes they respond and help us. It's give and take. So we do fire, EMS, rescue, wildland. We're just one department with many duties that we do, along with all our partner agencies. So we're 24-7 career readiness. We're here every day of the year, holidays, doesn't matter. We're here ready to serve. ALS response and transport, we do fire for the city of La Grande, ALS services for the county, and we'll talk more of that on another slide. We have mutual aid response plus some regional response, right? Wildfires are going on right now. We've been assisting OSFM, ODF. We've been out across the mountain several times already to help out on fires over there. So along with our partners, it's not just us. But we have a regional response that we help with. And so that's kind of who we are and who we work with. Our ALS ambulance area covers Union County. So it's the whole Union County. It's out in the wilderness, it's in the towns, it's everywhere. So the ASA is the geographical area where one ambulance provider is responsible for emergency response and patient transport. We are that provider. So we work with the county, I forgot to mention county. We work with emergency services quite a lot. All night last night. They were out last night doing some stuff. We work with Nick on the ASA. We're looking at it a little bit again. But we are the provider for the whole Union County. So it's a very, very big area. Um, just a little bit about calls. This, uh, in 2025, our total ASA EMS calls, that's where we went out for EMS, uh, anywhere in the county. We had a total of 2,370. We had a total call volume of 3,446. So the rest of those were just lift assist, fires, stuff that was in town here. Inside of La Grande, we had 1,879 calls for service for EMS. Outside the city, we had 491 calls. We went out to Elgin or Cove or in the Deer Crop Wilderness or wherever. So that's the ratio there. Why we do it, why we provide it, you know, We're 24-7. We have 24-7 career crews. We can do that. Because we're here for fire, we can also do the EMS. We have paramedics. We have EMTs and paramedics. You got to have those for the ALS part of the service. And then we have transport-capable ambulances. We just have the infrastructure to make it happen here. I couldn't imagine it. being somewhere else, to be quite honest. I think we provide the best service, and our guys do a great job. How the system works, get a call into 911, somebody calls in with an emergency, they dispatch the closest agency to the call, which could be La Grande Rural, it could be... Imler or Cove or whoever, they have QRTs, quick response teams. They get there before us. They start to provide care. And while we're still en route, out in Elgin and Union, they have their own little portion of the ASA for BLS. And so they take care of the Elgin and Union areas. And we meet up with them if it's an ALS call. And then if we need help, we get neighboring agencies to help us. We have mutual aid with everybody, with Pendleton, with Baker, the Humatilla Reservation, and everybody out there. So we do do some neighboring agencies, get some help from them. So any questions on our ALS? Yes?

The acronym ALS.

Advanced Life Support.

Thank you. And then the other question is on the lift support, the calls for lift.

Lift assist.

Lift assist. Yeah. I had heard from an assisted living home that there is no charge for that, that folks will go out and help.

We do not. We do go to there and help. We get very few. in the assisted living. We get a few throughout the year, but most of our lift assists are people just out in the community. And so we go help them get into their car or get into their house or they fell down, slipped out of their chair, and help them back in. We get a few. I'd have to run the numbers. Captain Lee, you got any idea? Jared? I... I don't think it's a huge amount we go to assisted livings, but there are some. And we don't charge for those.

There's no charge.

No charge, yeah. It's just a service we provide to help folks. You know, if we're getting a lot of them or something from somebody, then we need to help. They're having more trouble than, they need some help beyond what we can provide them. So we work to provide that to the community members.

And you might also hear, like if we're dispatched to Grand Ronde Retirement Residence, that we've done a slew of lift assist there. They have two sides. They have an unassisted side and an assisted side. So on the unassisted side, We'll spend more time there than we would on the assistant side because they have staff over there that usually will do the lift assist. Unless the patient's just a size that requires some additional manpower, then that's usually where we'll find this for that. Or if they need evaluated. Sometimes within their own protocols, they have the need for us to come and evaluate them.

Thank you. That's a good point. That building. Yeah, so we do those. We keep stats on them, and Captain Ployhar gives me the stats on the lift assist every month. We get it, you know, 10 to 20 a month probably that we go help folks. So, yeah, good question. Any other questions on this slide here? So you get it called the LGNU, both of you go out there, the LGNU? Yeah, it depends on the call. If it's a basic life support call, say somebody fell down and hurt their knee and they called for an ambulance, we won't get called. Elgin goes and takes care of it. But say if it's a cardiac arrest or a heart attack, they get on scene, they start transporting, our crews meet them en route, and then we ride in with them. And it's a great way to do it, you know, here in the frontier area or whatever they call it out here. But, yeah, sometimes they respond in Elgin, sometimes not. You know, they're a volunteer agency, so sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. But then we have to go all the way. So I'll have some numbers on response times. out there for us here in a little bit, so. Okay. Any more questions? Okay. Maybe. So here's our staffing. Right now we have 28 career staff. That includes one fire chief, one administrative assistant, which have three shifts or 18 firefighters, EMTs. And then we also have three EMT casuals at this time. And those are volunteers that we, they're trained EMTs. They come in and help us out when we need it. If they can, again, they're not, they're part-time and they may be gone on a weekend when we need them or something. So They help out as much as they can, and we greatly appreciate the casuals and their willingness to help. So that's what we have for 24-7 readiness. Okay. Go ahead.

So if you didn't have the opportunity to pay attention to the... budget hearings that we had and ultimately the budget that was adopted. This structure that you see here in front of you right now is the result of necessary cuts that needed to be made in the budget for the city. across the board, the organization looked to make a 10% cut in order to be able to meet some fiscal goals. That was difficult to achieve, but with only a 5% cut, two positions that were needed for the fire department were removed. And so Chief Lacey will do a great job of sharing with everybody Um, how hard that they work and how much that they provide, how much of the fire department as a whole and the police department as well, um, work hard to provide the services they do, but they cut pretty deep in order to make possible what they're doing right now. And, um, and that lack of positions, um, uh, is just makes it harder to do. Like for you guys, it's seamless of what they're providing in regards to service. But behind the curtain, these guys are paying a significant price in order to keep up the level of service that you're currently getting because of what they had to cut in order to get stuff done. So I feel like that's important to make sure that we make note of that. It's not because anybody did anything nefarious. It's just that's us doing the best that we can to be good stewards of our money. But I can also say that to the tune of some expense to the mental health of our employees, that's something that needs to be known.

What's the proper number for a city this size?

Well, this would be about right. I think with it, we need a deputy chief and we need another administrative person, a receptionist, to make us whole, to make us baseline. There's always talk about maybe another person or two on the line. But, you know, that would take a little bit more talking. But we need the deputy chief itself, which is my position before I got this position, took care of a lot of the training, the inspections that you talk about. You know, that kind of stuff that... takes it off my plate so I can think about strategy and how to run the department. And it's gonna, the guys are gonna pay some tax with this because, and the captains, because I gotta put those job duties to somebody and to have them. So we'll spread them out. We'll try to find different ways to do training and things like that and people to run them. So, um, yeah. So those two positions I think would make us baseline the, the, um, receptionist, um, is needed for backup for billing. We have an administrative assistant who is just busy taking care of that administrative stuff that's behind the scenes that a lot of times even the guys don't see, and I don't, that she's taking care of. And so I think that would take some of that pressure off there to help with those backups for payroll. Things like charts for just the filing, the little things. So that's the tax we're paying, I think.

Once you share with them, too, how much money we had to spend in overtime in order to cover all of that last year.

Oh, the overtime costs? We spent about $400,000, $425,000 in overtime last year.

in order to just simply be able to provide you the baseline service that we're able to do. We are actively working to try and figure out how to mitigate that for the future, but the problem isn't as simple to solve as throw five more bodies at it. There's a lot that goes into it, but we are actively working to try and address that impart to bring down our costs but also like both police and fire um they're the the tax that they're signing up and willing to pay and not complaining about Um, yeah, they get a little bit of a bigger paycheck, but they're also not spending time with their families. They're not taking the amount of time that they would normally have to reset in order to do what they're doing for us. So it's important that the community is aware of that reality, but we also owe to figure out a solution to that, that balances fiscal costs with the people that are providing the service.

Yep. So we'll be working on that throughout the year. You know, with John and I and Heather and Jennifer, I'm just trying to figure out ways we can help.

Heather's our finance director and Jennifer is his only admin assistant.

They do a great job. And that keeps the crews healthy, our staff. Yeah, it's a lot of overtime to work. And they do it without reservation, so...

She's out of curiosity about how many hours would that be per employee. Cool.

Boy, I'd have to run the numbers on that. It's a fair amount.

Do you remember how many total employees?

Yeah, so we work, because of our shift schedule, we work around 2,980 hours a year regular compared to what a normal 40-hour person would work about 2,100. And then I did 1,000 hours overtime last year in addition to the 2,900, so. And we had several guys that met that. Yeah, that's a lot.

Yeah, that's a lot. You hear cost of life when you hear money, but when you put it to a person's life of a thousand hours, it makes a different point.

And some of that comes from our staffing. We have to keep it five. That's by contract. Um, and so those are, you know, some of the things we'll look at. Um, we have to have five people here every day. Uh, you know, we talk about six, but there's usually some overtime or some vacation or sick leave or some when everybody's off. So, um. Injuries. What's that? Injuries. Injuries. Yeah. We have, have that too. So.

And. And babies.

And babies. We have a whole new family here, which is exciting too. You know, but there's, yeah, it's good to see. So we like it. But we also want to keep everybody healthy and mentally, physically healthy. And so it's just a lot sometimes. So we're going to work on that. That's our goal. We have three shifts. They all have a captain and five firefighters. So one six-person crew, they know how to do everything out there. They run the aerial, the ambulances, the rescue, all the tools, fight fire, provide EMS care. They do all this. They're all cross-trained to do that. They pump the engines, you know, and so, uh, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year that we do that with five or six people. Um, they do each call determines what the crew staffs just depends on what, what the call is. So, um, if it's a fire. They all jump on the engine and they take an ambulance too. We take an ambulance everywhere or the ladder or get in a brush. So any questions on more questions on the staffing part of it?

So do you basically have two teams in because you got six people? Or depending, I guess, on the situation.

Yeah, it's situation. If it's an ambulance, we have a first out crew, and they get on the ambulance. If there's an ambulance call, if we keep the radio up, there's probably, you know, here eventually we'll have one. They get on the ambulance, and they go to the ambulance call, just two of them. So that leaves four here, three to four here, and then they take the next one if we have two calls. They go take that one. Then once we get down to one person here, we have to start calling in standby, and we start doing that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that here as we move through that. Yeah, so it just depends on what caller. And that triggers the overtime. Yep, it can trigger some of the overtime, yep, yep. So our call demand is up 16% since 2018. It had a significant downtrend here, and I was trying to think. I think COVID was in there, which had some of it. I think the pad up at the hospital might have played some into this. It was down about, do you guys remember when the pad was in there? It was before that, but it played a role. Played a role in our, a little bit, because we do transfers. from the hospital to the airport. With Life Flight, we have a contract with them. And so we'll send one guy and he'll go get a patient in the Life Flight crew, grab them up at the hospital, take them out to the airport. And we have a contract to do that with them. That's for fixed wing, right? For fixed wing, yep. It could be a helicopter too, it just depends, but mostly fixed wing. And then a lot of times in the wintertime, live flight can't fly some. So we'll take a live flight crew and a person and go to Cadillac or Walla Walla or Boise and take patients there. So we try to do our part and help out when we can. Our captains are great at keeping us staffed here. Because when we do that, we've got to make sure we staff back here. This is the most important part here. And so they do a good job of that. Our guys come in, cover the station so we can do those things. So it's quite a process. But our call volume steadily went up. It did go down last year. We had a pretty high, 2024 was a pretty high year. And then it went down a little bit this year. What are we looking at captains this year? Where are we running towards? Just a little bit behind. Just a little bit. About 3,400. They pick up in the winter. Yeah. So we're going to end up about the same in the 3,400 range. But that same six-person crew, on that particular day, those nine calls a day, they take care of them. That nine calls could be 15 in one day and then three the next or however it works. That's just the average. They got a lot of nights when they spend all night. Any questions on our calls or demand?

What do you attribute to the jump in between 2020 and 2021?

You know, I do not know. I'd have to run the numbers on that to see what changed. Um, I don't know if we had more transfers or, uh, sometimes we get people, um, you know, that call a lot that add to that, uh, number. You guys got any ideas back then?

We had several things going on at once. So COVID was playing in the background, uh, the hella stop. So originally for the hella stop came in and we would go to the hospital, bring a crew to the football field. Oftentimes it was a helicopter. The football field, the high school, that generated some runs for us that when they put hella stock in went away. And then when they added the new surgical wing, the hella stock went away also. So you'll see kind of some of those dips and peaks that are just explained by things that went on during those periods of time. This year's call volume being down, if you think about the winter we had, we did not go on nearly as many freeway crashes as we normally would. So it's difficult to chunk out a block of time and say, oh, well, this was directly related to that because we will have cyclical cycles and people who come into our community who require more services and we're getting a piece of the mental health part of it, like the law enforcement folks are as well, that we'll see some upticks. So it's everything and nothing all at once.

I was just wondering if it had something to do with The pandemic and there being a lot more health-bound people. Right. Maybe during that time.

I think the low part is probably for the pandemic. The lower part. But then you see the uptick. You start to see people getting out more. You start to see people calling more. You know, they didn't want to go to the hospital.

Oh, yeah.

You know, during the pandemic. Yeah. That was pandemic and didn't like that. But for our guys, they didn't like that. But that same six-person crew, they take care of all those and they're cross-trained and they just do whatever it takes to make it happen.

So this slide is our response time. It's more than drive time. So all these numbers here are from when we get dispatched to when we arrive on scene. I went in. We have a program called Image Trend.

that I can run reports. It takes all the data that the crew's put in and I can run that data and it's very helpful. But every response has three parts. You get dispatched, your turnout time, time to get ready and get in the ambulance or the fire truck and go, and then the travel time. And all these, all this, these times are Total times from fire, EMS, lift assist, the whole picture. So our city response time is from the time we get dispatched until the time we arrive on scene is 6.5 minutes. Our turnout time, as I ran the numbers, was under two minutes as an average. So the guys are getting out. getting up, getting around and you know, they could be, it could be during the day or night. So there's no, really no, our response time is still good. Our response time varies by location out in the ASA, right? Gotta go to Cove, we gotta go to Imler and those places. So Cove was 21 minutes from Dispatch to on-scene, Elgin's 27 minutes, North Powder's 31, Somerville 23, Union 20, Imler 16, Island City's 8. And remember, some of these are, you know, it may be an Elgin residence, but it may be north of Elgin. You know, so you got to take that into consideration on some of these. So these averages are all of those, so. But we do a good job of getting out the door, covering calls, and some of the things that play into it, we can make sure our crews are ready. The crews can, hey, take the best route and make sure they're trained up so they get in their turnouts quick, get out the door quickly, get in the ambulance quick, get out the door quickly there. Some of the things that can add time is just the distance to the call. Weather plays a large role in road conditions. It could be a cardiac arrest or a chest pain. But if the road's a sheet of ice, it's going to take longer. If our guys don't get there and our ambulances, our crews, then you can't help nobody. So that's... Sometimes it that that changes it Traffic and railroad crossings go down on the freeway sometimes, right? We have this happen the other day get on the freeway. It's blocked. How do we get there? You know, we got to take the median or we have to run up the side of the road so that takes extra time Simultaneous emergencies we do get some get those we get multiple ambulance calls and so Those can, depending on where they are, change how quickly we get there. Where our ambulances are and if they're available. And also our staffing callback. If we get down to three or four ambulance calls, right, we're out of ambulances by then. Almost out of people. We've got to start calling back. So we call back people. We'll have to use our mutual aid partners to help us, Union and Elgin. and get the closest available people there to help when needed.

Urgent versus non-urgent. What's that? Urgent versus non-urgent.

Right, yeah, urgent. You know, we kind of pick between. Sometimes we have to pick. We don't do it very often, but we have to pick between, you know, the urgent and non-urgent calls out there. So, yeah.

On the railroad crossings, How much influence do you have if you need to go across those tracks but there's a train stop there?

Zero. Zero.

I just wondered.

That's a good question. Yes, we don't have any say. So we take one of the underpasses or the overpass every time.

But I was thinking even out. as you head out of town or something, you want to do that left hand turn on that road, but there's the train.

Yep. And we can see, you know, maybe a train out here or, you know, before they leave the crews can see it and, you know, make sure they go the right way that way, but we don't always see it. You don't always know what's out there. So yes, it gets us every once in a while, but we have no control over, over that. So good question. Any other questions on this one?

Well, if you don't mind, if there is an accident on the train tracks, though, we do have a fire and police both have a lot of power to stop the train. Yes.

If there's an incident on the tracks. On the tracks, yeah. Yeah, but if it's just blocking where we go. You know, like what goes on right now, there's not a lot we can do. They pretty much, I don't know, different times of the day, they definitely block the crossings.

There was a number that I called at the very beginning and it was not stopping like it is now. And I lost that number. Because I was able to call to the main office and I can't remember. I wish I logged everything down, but I didn't. But they are getting really bad again. blocking that and I know that the city gave them the extra land so they could move over but they're not anymore and so I think we need to deal with them again maybe a phone call again I think so hopefully you can find that number yeah I think I know who I need to contact yes yep okay if there's no other questions there

One call can change the coverage for the next. Like I say, we do go out of town. So when that happens, when we send an engine or a brush rig out on a wild land, you know, on a box alarm that we have here in town, it does reduce the amount of people we have in here. So that's where our captains come in. They make sure we have the right staffing. They make sure we get standby if we need it. And if we need to, we get mutual aid if there's something here in town. So we do a good job of providing the coverage. And it's maintained. And we get the right people to where they need to go. But it does take away a couple of bodies that we need to make sure we get back here to cover. Any questions on this slide? Kind of covered it in all the slides. Okay. Here we are, it's your guys' turn again. What concerns do you have about fire and emergency medical services? Are there any concerns out there that we're doing something wrong? That we're... about providing the best service that we can. Or maybe concerns that they're doing it too right?

Yeah, I don't know about that.

My only concern is you mentioned injuries.

So hopefully your firefighters are staying safe.

Yeah, yeah. I think I have a slide here, but they all are, you know, we train them. You know, we make sure they have all the safety equipment they need, all the training that they need. Also, they work out a lot. If you haven't seen, you know, they do a pretty good job of working out and staying healthy. And then we have to deal with the mental part of it, too. So, yeah.

I'm a volunteer coach, so thank you guys for the training here. Some of y'all moved out here, but... One of the concerns I have is if I have to come somehow support, or y'all are coming out there to support, having, I don't know, a yearly training event where we're working together as a county towards something. Because what I worry about is communication. I can communicate within our little four or five people that we show up every Wednesday night during training, but if I have to come and work for you in the way that you communicate, I don't particularly. know how effective and efficient i'll be to help you or to take your commands and do the work so right that is uh okay yeah so that that would be a stop coming major event here that we all have to rally around yeah stop coming up with good ideas yeah that's something i think we can we can address pretty pretty easily and uh work with uh chief walters and and scott how are you co

I'm at Cove.

I think OCHEC too would be interested in how to help organize something that's meaningful for the county.

Yeah, I think that's good. That's something that we could easily do a training or two. I mean, it doesn't have to be one. Put something on where we can all work together. This year is MCI month, or this month is MCI month here, and so we'll be doing that. Those are always good ones to do. But communication is important, and knowing how we all talk is good.

That's another point, pushing notifications out to the volunteer force that's out there now in this area, and what is... I work a regular job with my family and kids, and I would participate more if I knew. There was training and stuff. Yeah, communication pieces.

Yeah. Gotcha. Good. Very good. What should LGFD's highest priorities be during the next five years?

I like where your head's at.

Yeah, that's a good one. I think that's good, something we need to work on. Anything else?

Just continue to provide the best service you can with what you have.

How much teaching do you do with the community?

We do, at this time, we do a lot of school programs is our main focus. We don't do a lot of adult type trainings right now. And some of that's just due to that work. I try not to pile too much on. But that's something where if we had the deputy chief, we could make that happen more. And it would just make it easier. It's just hard to pile more on a cruise when they're doing 1,000 hours and running all the calls and the fires and everything that they're doing. They're trying to help out as much as possible. But, yeah, we do a lot of school programs. We don't do any fire extinguisher classes. I guess we do some fire extinguisher classes, yes. Yeah, we do that. We put up a few smoke alarms that we have from the state. But as far as any major programs, CPR, something I'd like to look at doing. But it just takes time, it takes money, and right now it's hard to do. But in the future, in the next five years, moving towards that I think would be good. Doing more of those outreach type things with our older adults.

and our adult populations, I think would be great.

We do, yeah. Right, we do have one of our fire captains, he, and one of the, from Cove, the EMTs from Cove, that we do EMT class here every year, and they've done that for like the past five years, and we, We help out Blue Mountain Community College here because it's a benefit to us. Because those EMTs now are going out in our communities and helping those volunteer agencies. So it's a great program. Yeah. So good thought. Yeah. So we'll work on, I think, hitting on the 1,000 hours of the overtime, making sure my goal is We're going to stay at baseline. We're going to keep all our guys on our administrative staff. And then if we can, get even a little better. So, you know, you always got to get better. So that would be my goal.

Chief, I think you touched a lot on how diversified your crews have to be. But, I mean, even more so because these guys also do rope rescue stuff with water rescue. Tim's. As Matt, I mean, you talk about concerns in the next five years, like kind of mission creep, I guess, like we're always taking more and more on, which can be really challenging because it's not like back in the day, 50 years ago, it was like, all we did was firefighting, you know, a little bit of medical maybe. And now it's like all these other specialties that we have to be really good at. It can be a challenge of police deal with the same thing.

Yeah, good point. Mission Creek, we have to watch it. I think we're at our limit. We added in some wild land this year that we're aggressively going after, and it's been good, but we've got to watch what we're... We can't get too far out there with our Mission Creek, so good point.

Chief, what? What kind of volunteers do you have that help? I'm not necessarily talking about volunteer firefighting, but I'm talking about volunteer maybe admin or volunteer in helping with training or something like that. Is there any type of volunteer and or would that cause more of a problem?

We do not have any volunteers. I honestly could not tell you if that would cause more of a problem or not. It just depends on what they were volunteering for. Is it out of the realm of thinking about? No. But there is some training involved with what we do. Everything from even billing, they've got to know different things and stuff like that, teaching fire classes and things like that or CPR those those things so not something we could think about but I don't know where that would go so yeah yeah yeah any more questions what information would help you understand future service decisions Like if you were having to vote on something or what information would be good for you folks out in the community that would help make decisions that we can provide you?

I think it's good for the community to know that you're doing 1,000 hours over time. I mean, and I think it kind of lets the community know that, We probably need to help you guys out a lot more as a community because of mental health, and that's also with the police. I don't think the community is really aware of all the things that both departments do and the stress and everything that it puts on you. And I think that needs to be more out there and more aware for people to know.

I like it. Anything else? Any data that you would help that we could provide? I mean, we're providing some of the run numbers and things like that, but we can break it down a little bit.

I think if you did break down the calls as to kind of what they were, the analytics kind of of what each of those calls were and I mean, it's really good to see the numbers, but it would be really good kind of with that mission creep that you were talking about, saying, did you know that this month we did X, Y, and Z of these different calls? It's not just firefighting. It's these different things. It might open the eyes for the community. I think that would be really good for the police department, too, to kind of explain what everybody is doing so that it helps the community understand. the necessity of what is needed and why maybe more positions are needed. Right.

Yeah, I know Jason, when he does some of his reports, he goes through the day, all 40 calls.

I posted that on Facebook, and I got a lot of comments on it, like, oh, they do that much?

Yeah. Yeah.

So I think that information is actually, like you were saying, very important to get out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good. Good. Yeah, I think that... I think maybe an explanation of how you're spending the money, like the other one we talked about, the ambulance, and how you can rebuild them instead of buying a whole new one by changing the modular out and putting a new cabin chassis, you can save a third of the cost. So people know that you're missing... Not running out there buying a new ambulance all the time. We're looking at it, having it analyzed. How much is it going to cost to bring it up to standards? We can put a cabin chassis under it and save you some money. Right.

The why behind it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good. Great. Cool. Okay. Well, we'll move on here. So readiness is built before the call. We just talked about all those missions, right, that we do, and we have to train on every one of them. EMS skills, there's Owen back there teaching some, this is a MedQuest teaching, but EMS skills, we have to know all about those or we get very good at those. Hose and fire ground, Captain Tibbets is his crew. training in the DPSST fire training box. Do some live fire stuff. Rescue drills. We got to practice because those rescue drills, those are for us. Those are to save us if we get in a pickle in a burning building or something. We do some multi-unit operations. Then there's the MCI, the Continuing Education on EMS. where these guys are required 60 hours a year just of training. Then they have on top of that just required training for EMS. 60 hours for fire, another 48 for paramedics, how many for intermediates? 36 for intermediates and 24 for EMTs. So all that is a lot of training. Our training totals for 2025, we had a total training hours of 1,770. Fire was 1,060 hours, and EMS, 710. So a lot of hours. It's about, I think, a couple hundred, 200 apiece between the 18 crew members. So lots of hours they spend training. This doesn't, and we'll talk, I think we'll wait and talk about it on another slide. But all this is to maintain required certifications. They're continuing education. They've got to keep it up. Practice high-risk, low-frequency drills. Those are those ones that will get you if you don't pay attention. And so those are the ones we're good at EMS. We need to practice those high-risk ones more. We train across shifts, partner agencies. We train a lot with La Grande Rural. They're our closest agency. We have a lot of the same SOGs that we work together. And so we train with our partner agencies. And then we also do officer development, which we need succession planning here. We need to have the next people up and ready to go. And so that's, in my next five years, that's going to be something we work on. So we need to have those next leaders of our department ready to go. Any questions on the readiness training part? Reliable apparatus. We need apparatus that's reliable. Costs. And these are probably a hair bit low. An ambulance is about $300,000, probably more like $325,000. You know, give it a month or two, it'll go up. An engine, our latest, last engine we bought was $650,000. They're up around a million now. The ladder's $2 million. And the rescue we just purchased is $375,000. So they're just cost. It's the way it is. We know that. Grants have helped us a lot here. Our current ladder and also our engine were both through AFG grants that we're lucky enough to get. But you can't count on them. So you do have to prepare for the future you know, saving money. And that's one of those things that went away in the budget cut was our 50 grand that we put away every year for an ambulance or an engine or a rescue. That went away in these latest budget cuts. So I'd like to see that come back. We need to prepare for the future. But, you know, having reliable apparatuses is key to what we do. It makes sure we're ready, and it helps protect our citizens. So we don't want things going wrong with apparatus. We don't want an ambulance breaking down when somebody's having the worst day of their life, or there's a fire.

Which coincidentally might be the worst day of their life. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. So building LGFD's future workforce. We send all our firefighters go through a probation period. And it takes a year to do. We have workbooks. We have things they gotta do throughout the year. It's pretty intense, I think. And I believe that it provides us great firefighters when they're done. Our strategy is to recruit qualified people. Have a strong probationary period and FDO development. We want to make sure our FDOs are qualified and teach them the right things. Grow our own paramedics. We've done that in the last, Chief Cornford started, I don't know, four years ago, five years ago. And we're, we have two current students in the program. We have about seven that graduated. And it takes about 16 months to go through the program. This program, it costs us a little bit of money, I will tell you. But it is the reward that we're going to get out of it is going to be amazing when we're done. And we're almost there. So I think we have our last pinning next week to get our department as fully staffed, all promotionary, Firefighters are complete, and it's exciting. If you have all this, if you have a full staff, it creates a healthy culture, a place where people want to stay, good training, and there'll be ups and downs. I've been around long enough to know it's not always perfect, but we'll do the best we can to keep that culture good, so we have the right people here.

Out of our graduates?

So we had a two leave after they got there. They do pay us back. They sign a contract and they pay us back either in years worked or the dollar amount. that was built into the program. So, yeah, the first couple years we lost a couple. So you lose that time too, right? You have to hire somebody, do it all over again. So that's why it takes so long. So we've got to keep it going. And pretty soon we'll be all paramedics except for these two guys that have been here for a while. So, hey. They were here before all that started. But they're close. They're almost paramedics. Yeah, they're intermediate. So the paramedic program, it's extensive classroom and study time. This is back in Boston, but they take all their classes here. They can be live. Can you be live, Owen? Live online or you take it, you have like five days to get it done, every class that they give. And then you go back for two weeks and they go back there and do an extensive boot camp, they call it. And then they come back here, do their hospital rotations, their ambulance field internship. It's hard on them for a while, for that 16 months. But I keep telling them the reward is good. the end it's all good and it's worth doing so their family pays a little bit because they're working here at the same time and also also doing that and then they just have to keep up their continuing education after that so it's a good program what is the hospital clinical rotations so they have to do when they get done With school back there, part of the schooling is to go work in the hospital. So they go do ER time in the hospital. For how many hours do you do, Owen? 300 hours. 300 hours in the hospital? Yeah. So the whole goal behind this is to put out the best paramedic that we can. And the school starts that. And then we continue that process on. So, yep. But they go work in the hospitals. And then they do 150 hours of ride time here on their days off. And then 150 over in Pendleton or a different agency. So they get to see other agencies. So, yep. Great program. And I think it's good. Any questions on that? Anything you want to add, Owen? Told you you might get to speak tonight. Nope? Okay. Here's a big one. We've talked about this a little bit. We got to keep our firefighters healthy. Got to keep them physically healthy. You know, a lot of them are very good about their fitness and nutrition. Make sure they're not injuring themselves. Mental wellness, we need to make sure we give them support, healthy coping. People probably don't realize what these guys see, these crew members, what we read through charting or administrative staff. It's stuff that people don't see every day and it can build up over time. So we gotta take care of our people. Sleep. You guys probably didn't know it. Probably nobody knew last night that Nick was up most of the night. Two of our guys were up most of the night. They were in the Eagle Cap Wilderness rescuing somebody. And so a lot of people, they don't get a lot of sleep sometimes. And we got to make sure we're taking care of them. that way. A lot of times these guys are up most of the night and so they get fatigued and we try to give them some rest when we can, but they still go out and do the job. Peer support, looking out for one another. Those bad calls, you know, they come back and they have to talk about it with each other. And so their peers are great. Then we got to keep an eye on the family, how the families, you know, their family life is. and making sure they're communicating with each other, their family right. So they need a whole person wellness. That picture you see right there was our struggle well class. This square you see right here tonight was full of our whole crew, our whole department for two days and went through the struggle well training Shows them how to cope, how to recognize stress and mental health problems, and then how to take care of it and come out on the other side being a better person. So great training. The guys, you know, we didn't know what to expect, but I think it was good for our department. Gave them some tools and ways to cope. We also have a weekly... mental health professional that comes in and talks with the guys, the crews, and I keep calling them guys, but the crews, the men that work here, men and women, and they have a mental health professional that comes in every week for an hour, and it's been very beneficial. It costs a little bit of money, but it's worth every penny to keep everybody here for that culture, that we need to have. So taking care of our firefighters improves the service that's out there. Healthy firefighters are better prepared to serve the community and sustain a long, healthy career. So that's why we do it. Any questions on the wellness? Anything to add, crews? Guys? So looking back, did we address The expectations you shared, are we meeting those expectations? Is there anything surprising that we talked about tonight? I think the overtime hours has been a surprise. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Some of that, you know, and we could go back probably several years, actually. Captain Tibbetts, do you remember when we were six people down? Yeah, just three or four years ago. And the amount of overtime that we had to work just to keep the station staffed so that we could provide the service. We just couldn't get people hired quick enough. And then the training that's involved. All the training, we can hire somebody. but it takes nine months to get them fully released as a firefighter working on their own, or an EMT. Yeah, overtime, I don't disagree.

I think it would probably just be a good idea to just mention that the overtime dollars in that number of thousand hours is deeply complex to Chief Lacey, and especially if that was something that you left here with, was like, that's a lot of money or a lot of hours, like understanding how a paid leave organ plays into that, and how turnover played into that, because historically those numbers aren't the numbers that we worked when we were fully staffed and before paid leave organs.

Yeah, there's a lot that plays into it, and that's what it When John was talking about it there earlier, we have to dig deep into it to see, you know, where our short-staffed people were at that point in time. Yeah, and what plays into it were people sick. We short-staffed, plus people were sick, injured, you know, vacation. You know, people have to have some time off, too. You can't just work. all them hours and not have a day off. That's not a good way to run business. So all those play into it. And we're gonna dive into it and see where we can maybe make some adjustments and stuff.

Last year we had three probationary firefighters all coming through at one time. Those folks, when they hit the ground running here, aren't ready to be fully released. And so we don't count that person as a minimum five. So we have to hire back for that person while they're in training. I think Chief mentioned our last probationary firefighter is getting pinned next week, so those hours won't be in this year's calculation. So it's just, yeah, there's a lot that goes into that.

Yep. Yeah, it's just, it's a lot that we have to have to think about it and work. And just to keep to that, right, to keep to that five person staffing. I think we just added another one pretty recently. So like in the last couple of days. So yeah. What questions do you still have? Hopefully I answered some of them. I just got one more. Yeah.

Looking at the budget, the revenue you're getting from ambulance services is 1.7 three or four years ago, 1.5. Last year you budgeted 1.5. But then this year you only budgeted 1.2. Right. But that was created eight months ago. So now you've got eight months more of data on revenue you got each month, I assume. Is that number you got recently, does that line up more with getting 1.5 or 1.2?

You know, I'd really have to look at the numbers. I'd have to run some numbers on it. And I can look at those. Some things, you know, Medicare plays into it, Medicaid, all that stuff. So... Those numbers, you never know where they're going to end up until all the dollars are in from the ambulance cost. Well, that's the second part.

Does that include, they call it ground emergency... GMT? GMT, yeah. Does that include that ground money too then?

That one, yeah. Yeah. That money is involved in there, I believe. But I'll make sure and double check. Because I know it sometimes takes a long time to do. It does. Yeah, they're almost a year behind times. And we have to pay some money out to get some money, basically. It's something that I don't fully understand. I know a little bit more after last year, but it's quite a process just to some money back but it's good that we're getting that um i have also seen that that could be going away so we need to push for to keep that because that those are dollars that you know medicaid and medicare don't pay very much those are dollars that help you know create more revenue because it doesn't pay much so what i read i guess Great questions. I'll see if I can get you some answers. Thank you. Yep. Are there any?

Yeah, I just want to say one other thing. I had to call and use your services a few years ago for my husband. And I just want to say it was a great experience. I mean, they even had a branch of a tree crash down right by them and They were just cool. And they responded very, very well and really indebted to the service. And they were so apologetic because it was during winter. The roads weren't plowed yet and so forth. But they got there still. And I just really appreciated that service. And you guys are doing an awesome job. And I think you just need to hear that more often.

Thank you. I think they hear it too much.

Especially the police department feels like they hear it too much.

I was going to add kind of a personal story to this too, and that is I live in apartments that have 32 units, one story, designed for elderly and disabled. So there's a lot of different things, even hearing, that they're not... sometimes able to know what's going on when an ambulance is called. They're always glad that the ambulance has been called for someone, our neighbor, and there's this calming presence when they enter the building. There's a confidence and Not very much information because that's not what they're there for, but sometimes some information that calms everyone that has gathered in the lobby. But just the confidence and the presence is so helpful and just takes away a lot of the fear that others are experiencing.

We're there to help. supposed to be that calming presence and I think our crews do a great job of that so yep so thank you any other questions that we haven't answered yet what's the funniest thing you've ever had to respond to as a I sometimes well when we uh You could make a book out of some of the things, but it's all HIPAA related. Man, you're putting me on the spot now. Choose one. There's probably... Count of the tree. Count of the, yeah, yeah. Man. You guys got anything funny? But we talked about it in this company. That's the hard part. Yeah, they see some stuff.

I would draw the question.

Right. Yeah. It's a good question. It's just hard to come up with.

I will say this. When I started my career a long time ago, I thought, well, sure, I'll write a book about that. After about year five, I thought I could either write that book or I could write the book titled, You Called the Ambulance for That. And I think that book right now would be a little thicker.

Yeah.

So we go to all kinds and all things. See some stuff.

How much time do you think you spend just on calling? Do you need to be called?

On calls that don't need us? Man, oh. You don't have an opinion on that. No. I think, yeah, I wish we could put a number on it, you know, like, but we, you know, there's, you know, there's time to call the ambulance and there's time to, you know, people can take themselves to, yeah, those urgent, non-urgent calls. And, you know, maybe some education out there we could put out, you know, just to help that a little bit. But, yeah, there's, it's a, There's a few calls every day that, you know, probably somebody could have went to the hospital, you know, themselves or what.

We're kind of the fix-all for the small community. There's not the resources out there to help people. And so for something small, it's a big deal to them, and they just don't have someone to reach out to. And we're kind of that fix-all to start the problem-solving for them.

Right, right. That would be the risk in answering it is we're not trying to discourage people from reaching out for help. And the last thing we wanted to do is make them pause and think, am I a dumb person calling? When in all reality, like they said, they get there, they'll educate, but they'll educate lovingly for the future. Because there's no dumb call. Not that you asked for my opinion. Right. right great questions anything else i'll i'll throw something into the mix okay one of the things i found out shortly after coming into the seat as a city manager i made the selection for the police or for the fire chief emergency manager for the county and he is the expert on