City Council - Regular Meeting

Well, you do. Oh, okay. I got you.

Good evening, everybody. We're going to start this study session tonight. It's Thursday, June 11, 2024, 6.08 p.m. We don't need a roll call, do we? Okay. We've got three items on the agenda. I would say all councilmen are present except for Councilman Terry. I think he's on his way. But we've got three items. Okay. One, review of resolution number 126-18 for submission of safer grant application. Number two, discussion on bond financing for fire station number three and related equipment. And number three, council consideration of shift work to pay for firefighters. So, Chief, I want to let you dig in and get us started.

Mayor.

Yes, sir.

The chief... has asked if we could reverse these, where one become the last and three become the first. And I said I didn't have any objections. If the council didn't have any objections, we're gonna move three. Because three is kind of more around staffing. And what I'd ask for was, it says shift work. I see myself sat with two ISO auditors. the only two for the state. And they're the ones that kind of give me the idea. And they said in some fire departments that were like ours, one of the best things they had and they could give credit for was people accepting shift work and there'd be a pay for a shift work. So that's where that come from. And I was just interested in the council's willingness to support something like that. But I'm going to let... Stewart go into whatever other staffing, what his idea is on staffing needs.

Okay, let me ask a quick question. We're talking about shift work. Chief, is this what we're doing now, your 10-hour shift? Is that what you're talking about, the 10-hour shifts? Or no?

So it's what I was after.

It's something a little different. Okay.

The ISO guys said they had both been career guys. They worked for ISO, Insurance Service Audit. And they said they're both on pay-per-call and volunteer fire departments in central Arkansas. And they said they were having the same troubles we were having with people showing up and all that. And we discussed our shift work. And they said we actually have had better... He said, we have actually had more people sign up to be on call. And he said, so you would actually sign up for a shift from 5 AM to 5 PM. The city would pay you a nominal fee. I don't know what that is. We'd turn that back over to fire department, $75, $80, something like that. And when you accepted that shift, you guaranteed that you would remain in the city limits. Now, you might be an electrician putting in some work, or you may be mowing your yard or whatever, but if the call come in, you are definitely going to be there. Now, they kind of went into, you know, it's just like regular employment. I mean, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, school calls and says your kid's throwing up, you have to come do that. You know, just typical employee stuff. But for the most part, he said they would accept shifts, and then they guaranteed they would be there. So he said that actually worked better than what we were doing, although he said that's interesting. And he said, and also when you have that shift work, I mean, when you had that paid per call shift work where you accepted a shift in a time period where you didn't leave town, you got the documentation. And he said, and we come back in a few years, we look at that documentation. And he said that helps your ISO rating. And he said, we'll give you credit for that. So, AC, you were sitting there. Is that about the way you remember it? Yeah. Have I said it about right? Did I say it in a way people would understand?

Did he say how many people actually there were per shift? How many do they allow per shift?

He never said how many they allow. And I guess my conversation to y'all is would we support it and let the fire department figure it out and see if Stuart could do it within his budget, within his current budget. And I was just wondering what your feelings are. But Stuart's got some other staffing questions.

I guess it really boils down to how many people he needs per shift and then how much you're doing. Yeah, how many people per shift and then how much could he pay per person or per shift?

Those are answers. We didn't get into the details with the ISO guys. The whole time we were having the conversation, I really kind of felt like he was talking about two or three or four people. that are accepting, you know, a shift from either 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., saying, without a doubt, I will be there, I will not leave the city limits and be in Fort Smith at Lowe's, or I'll be at my house or I'll be working around town. I really, he didn't get into those details. I really think if it's something y'all would entertain, and that's all I'm wanting to know is if it's something you entertain, we're just going to push it to the fire department and let them come back with the details.

Would somebody who responds also get paid for that call?

Yeah, they get paid for that call.

So you get shift pay and the paper call?

Yep. So if nothing happens, they still get that $75 for accepting the shift. If something happened, they get the 70 bucks, 75 bucks plus whatever the call. What does the call pay? What does the call pay for 30?

So then they would get that plus $30.

Who are you talking to?

two ISO auditors for the state of Arkansas. One did the east side of the state and one did the west side of the state. And it really wasn't just exactly east and west. They kind of had it cut at a diagonal. One was ours. The other one was for the other part of the state. What I was, they were just saying it worked in situations like ours. It's something to think about.

Question in, how many would you need per shift? Would you need three to four, Lance?

There we go. Okay. Council, sorry, I'm not up there, but I wanted to go through here so we could put it. This year, 36% zero. The reason we're having zeros, and a lot of these are at nighttime or on weekends, has to do with availability, not want to, not wanting to be paid to go, not how much we're paying them, but them be actually physically in Greenwood to go to the call. They're either on their job and their job will not allow them to leave which is something that back in the 1980s and 70s, everyone worked in town. You had Spud Mitchell that worked for one company. You had my dad that had his own company. You had the guys that worked at the bank. You had the guys that worked at the grocery store. It was just everybody was close and local. People that worked at Greenwood Fixture were allowed to leave. Everyone was allowed to leave. Now we're hiring people. The only people allowed to leave are the people that own their own business. But the problem is, is people that own their own business, like Rod or Lance or several, they may be at work at Lake Ouachita. They may be in Fort Smith.

Wait, are you working at Lake Ouachita?

Yeah, I might be working. But we don't have that many. And so the new guys that we're taking on, they may work for... ABF, USA Truck, State Highway Department, all places where when they are at work are not allowing them to leave unless they are home. We even have a couple that work at home that they count how many punches they do on their computer so they can't leave. And if they do, I've had one leave and say, I've got to get back because my lunch break is almost over. And so they'll lose their job if they leave. And so that wasn't the problem in the past. You had people that worked with them. One thing that we've tried to push, and haven't really gotten very far on it, is try to make it statewide where So volunteer firefighters are considered like military, and you don't have a choice when someone goes to work for you. But getting our legislators to push that is going to be kind of tough because they're going to have a lot of kickback from companies saying no. Or that person is just not going to hire somebody that's a volunteer firefighter because they know they'll have to be able to leave. but it has everything to do with availability. And, um, I can definitely see we have one or two guys that when they are not in town, we have, we have quite a few zeros, uh, just because they make the majority of the, of the medical calls. Um, one of the new, one of the new, um, um, it's, uh, one of the new SOGs over her standard guidelines or, or, uh,

what is that, a pro-call, I guess, over at EMS, is they have two ALS units. They're 24-7.

We all pay taxes for those two ALS units every year out of our taxes. If there is one unit that's gone, I understand where it's coming from, but if there's one unit that's gone and there is a lift help call, a priority four, No matter where it's at in the county, that second unit will not leave the station until the other unit's back. So they're paging first responders throughout the county to go help with those lift helps. And when the other unit gets back, or if they have two units, one unit will go to the lift help. But if one unit's gone, the other one sits right there. And so we have to go to those lift helps. And If we had two full-time guys over here, there would be no problem with that. The problem is when you get that lift help call, and we see it's the same place that we've been 20 times, and that wife says, are you really going to leave whatever they're doing and go down there to do that? especially when they're not even in town or if they're over at the ball clubs, but by the time they get out to their car and they get in their car from a baseball game and they get down there that the person's been there for 30 minutes, a lot of times our police officers have already been there to help lift up. The other day I had one of the officers help me on a lift help. It wasn't bad, but we had some lift help. uh... right now i can't do anything cuz i don't know i've done something my shoulder and so i've told the guys i'm kinda off for a couple days cuz uh... pope i haven't done something bad but a lot of these calls have to do with lifting up the other problem with uh... that is when we get there we find more than just little sometimes we find that they've had a something either broke something bleeding And that's all well and, I mean, we'll take care of that. But we're not the advanced life support unit. We are, we're there as their backup. And the more calls that they have where they're not going to, and we have guys not available, you're seeing zeros for our community where people are wondering, what the heck am I paying for?

You know, go ahead, Estee. Okay, so you're talking about this, and I'm going to retain 5%. Okay. It'd be good if we could get this in the form of a proposal that itemizes the things, the considerations that we need to reflect on. Yeah. Because we'll forget most of them. I mean, this is just too much information for us. Well, that's why I wanted to do a study session so we could discuss some of the issues. But I'm just saying, when you come in, have something that we can look at and take with us. The study session's good. We've got some big topics. But I would like to see a proposal to how many people you would want per shift, how it compares to the budget. Stuff that we can take with, absorb it, and ask you questions as time goes on.

Okay. Well, we, right now, go ahead.

No, I was gonna ask you this. You've got the percentage of no-shows there. I'm assuming because rescue EMS is the largest incidence out of those events that most of those no-shows are that.

I went through it when I was going through looking at them. There's a couple of those that they were paged out on the medical side. of, uh, uh, and, and they were a car accident, but they were only paged through the medical side. They never made it through the fireside or they would have at least been responded to. Cause we probably have, uh, you know, five or six guys that don't do medical at all that would respond to that. Um, I was looking here, what rod was bringing up. We have nine of our 25 that don't live in the city limits. So it's going to be kind of hard for them to respond quickly when they live in Mount Zion or over on the other side of Excelsior. And we're having to allow that so we can keep people here. Unfortunately, our firefighters can't find a place with an acre and a house inside town that they can afford, so they end up buying outside the city limits, even though it's within the mile. radius they'll they'll buy out there in that area and that unfortunately unless they're coming down and working a shift takes them out of response area takes them a long way unless it's a structure fire or a car fire or a car accident but if it's a cardiac arrest I mean, or somebody that's bleeding, choking, they need to be, we need someone here locally.

Sorry to interrupt you. What's your, and this doesn't help you with your recruiting because I know it's just a tighter squeeze or whatever you want to call it. What's your requirements? If any, I assume you have some requirements for your guys to make certain amount of calls. What does that look like?

We've never put a number you have to make. Basically, if you go through, the guys make the majority of the fire calls. On the medical calls, I've gotten a lot of burnout, and then I've got a lot of guys that have let their medical side go because they don't have time to do the medical.

What do you mean they don't have time?

They don't have time to do a medical call. It's different than a fire call, different training, different all the way around.

You know how I stand. This is just half a cent worth of whatever it's worth. You need some people. You need some bodies. But I think, and again, it's not going to help you necessarily with, yep.

Well, I'm just going to comment.

Yep.

I can't cut off here today to go for a fall. Well, you got it. So when they get here, the last thing they want to do is go to the park. It's not that they don't want to. It's just that somewhere along the line, they have to have a lot besides the real job and the city or the park. It's not that we don't want to respond to the medical calls, but myself included, I would stay out. And I know we're not staffed, but we do such a good job of what we do.

They're going to let you do it. They're going to let us do it, sir.

So until we make a believer out of it or get some staffing, then we're never going to fix that.

No, I totally, and I knew of that, sir. I knew chief and I've talked about that before. What, how that works over there and why we don't, I don't know why they do it. I don't, I think that's still up in the air. I don't know.

That needs to be fixed. Yeah. Right.

You mean answer that on it? You mean answer that honestly? If I signed up for it, I would.

No, I get it. You get burned out.

I get it. I think that that's the issue. But to answer your question bluntly.

Hey, if I signed up for it, I'm doing it. I'm here. I'm here.

I'm here.

I signed up to run for mayor, and I've made every single – it's not a fire call. It's not a lift call. But you signed up for it.

I signed up for a job also.

That's what I'm saying. I'm involved in that. So Lance.

No, I'm not.

You are. Lance. That's what I'm saying. That was your choice. This address. And you need people.

Don't get me wrong.

Are they not required to have – Yeah, I know. Yeah. CNA, LN, somebody there on staff at that address. I'm talking about the one that you're repeatedly going to.

It may not help. They call

And part of that problem is that facility. That's a fact.

But if they're medically trained, medically certified, they should be doing the lit. I mean, they should be. I mean, all honesty.

Some of the stuff we do, we're glorified babysitters. I mean, I'm just being honest with you. Like the address out of here was that we've been doing, I mean, I probably didn't smack all the guns, but I mean, there for a while, it was 300 feet.

Is it really a call or is it just because you can't afford to get or you're

It's unbelievable.

But even if it's going to be a change, we're going to put it on a call that this poor lady, God bless her son, she needed help.

what you're going to get into. Two, you don't know how big this person is. I mean, everybody. And then three, you know, well, something got stole or some lady, well, he touched me. Well, you know, it's just never easy. And so those guys are put in a position to where it's not that they're scared to do it. It's just that we don't have the 100% advanced medical training that they got over there. So that's why we're only limited to what we can do. So we're filling the gap for them when the time comes, but we're only limited to what we can do. Half the time we're there and we're waiting for the force to come down or Sebastian Kennedy, you know, they're busy. We're sitting there babysitting this person. Well, that's not even going to do it by itself. And that's to what you were going to say, Roger, as far as the having personnel through this whole thing, and I told him, I said, you know, if we get one, we get one, but two's ideal for shift work or anything, because if something happens, I mean, hell, I could have a stroke for doing CPR, you know? I mean, so...

I had one of those.

They're not even... Yeah, I mean, it goes on and on, but in the fire service, it's a team deal, and that's... And if you get one person on a shift, and I'm coming in, so I build the way I would do it. You can't pull a hose by yourself. I mean, the dream of all dreams would be three, to your question. I mean, that would be the dream of all dreams. You pull up any fire department that's minimally staffed, and they have .

What's the likelihood of getting anything better over there at the ambulance, specifically to what you're talking about?

They've been asking for years for a third ambulance, and that would probably solve a lot of problems. It would still, every once in a while, rear its head. Like today, I think there was probably four calls that or five calls seemed like at the same time, two in Greenwood, a couple outside of Greenwood going on all at the same time where they would have been very busy. And they do call for the backup unit. And they're not doing it maliciously. They're doing it because they're trying to make sure they're covering those priority ones and twos. We're one of the few departments that has quite a few responders. Most departments out there only have one or two. and they're wearing them out in the county. I don't know how they keep their people going. One of our other issues, I say issues, one of our other challenges is that we have 12 full-time fire or EMS personnel on the department that work a 24-hour shift. So every three days, they're gone a full day. one works at twenty four uh... forty eight on ninety six off which act kinda helps us because we have in four days first two days he's gone he works up rogers so we have twelve people that either work twenty four or one that works forty eight so twelve our people let's just say a third of them are out every day. So that drops us from our 26 right now, which at one time we were up to 33. We can't get anybody to apply for the department. So out of that 26, there's going to be at least three to four guys that aren't available no matter what we do because they're working on a 24-hour shift somewhere. And that's for a full day. So that drops us down to 22 that's available at any time. And as I said, guys that can't leave their jobs, we've had time when we've done things with four people, which we've been able to get things done with that. A car accident yesterday, there was four of us over there at Coker and 10. And we were able to do that. but took a little time for everybody to get there because one was on the other side of town, and I was at the station. I went right there. I have one that lives up the street, so we got there very quickly, but the other one lives out of town on the south side of town, and he was able to get there after a few minutes. And just where we're at right now, we need two people at least in the station 24-7. And everybody else can fill in those gaps and those time periods. And we're just going to, at some point, we're going to have to find a way to do that. That will solve the zeros. Do we mind doing lift help? No. That's great PR for our city. You're paying your firefighters. So we're coming out and we're doing that. There's a difference between the person that, as Lance said, or Mike, that's getting up at 3 in the morning after just going on another lift help call and people being paid to do it right here at the station. And it'd be cheaper. I mean, that side of it.

Yes, sir. Okay. From what I've heard, that sounds like a potentially viable option. But, I mean, you've presented lots of good information here. And it may be a good idea. But it's like he said earlier. Hand it off to you guys to make this more formal. Let us know that it actually works. Put it on paper and say, here's how it affects the budget. Here's how many people we need per day. Here's this and that, but we've got some other issues. Everybody's made good comments tonight, but we don't have anything to review. I think about this. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a presentation to us, and I might say next month or whenever it is, I think we need to do this, but I can't tell yet because it's not on paper. There's no math.

Mr. Tedford, I think that Tom's put some stuff together for the grant already that shows payment for two and for three that he's going to talk about here in a few minutes.

Stuart, I've got a question. So do you worry at all that if you have – two people full time at the station And we're talking about a hybrid fire department here where you've got two full-time people. Do you worry that in the event of a fire or something that people that are volunteer status are like, oh, there's already two?

Absolutely. And it happens. Every combination chief I've talked to says you have the ones that you lose because you have full-time staff, but you also have the guys that know somebody's going to be there and they're wanting to show up too. He said you have a little of both.

Yeah. I can see having the benefit of those two people down there full-time for the lift calls. They're the first ones on the truck and out the door, but I'm also worried that You've got the guy that's sitting at home and, you know, 2 o'clock in the morning, they're like, eh, there's – I don't think it's going to be that way on fires.

On the fire call side of it, we get a different page. We get a totally different tone for a fire or medical call. And so a lot of the guys, they'll turn the tone for medicals off and keep the fire on. I cannot control that. That's kind of my way. it's uh... it's just it's it's like there are you here if you want you want to get to turn to my total and and that's not uncommon it's not just uh... stats that's a nationwide control absolutely i can't control because volunteers and just turn his gear and walk off and then working with what we stuck with i'd say i don't know

Nobody's making a lot of money here. I don't need the money for porn. You know what I'm saying? It's not about that.

It's about I want to.

Because I have a passion for the fire department. And I don't go to medical calls. I'll tell you straight up.

My passion is the fire department. My passion is growth rescue. I've got what I'm good at. Medical's not what I'm good at. I don't like going in a house that's knee-deep in water.

Well, the answer you said, and I had thought about it too much, because the first hearing that, you can't control it. That didn't ring well with me.

Well, I know.

I know. Good point. Good point. Thank you.

Yeah. If you guys are interested in something like this, we'll work on it, we'll get you numbers. If you're not interested at all, we're not gonna go to the trouble of getting all the numbers.

I'm not interested in a large number of zero responses. So if you all have a better model, and I can look at it, I would be interested in it tonight, even though there's not a voting meeting. But I just want to look at something and be able to evaluate it, take it with me, mull it over, and be able to make a decision. So if Tom has some numbers,

I think that's your cue, Tom.

I think everybody up here wants this to happen, in my opinion.

Don't ever misunderstand.

No, absolutely. Like you said, it's been kicked down the road.

We've got almost 20 years in. It's getting harder every day for us. Just under eight. Neither one of y'all are looking good right now.

Then they eat well.

I can testify. One good thing about it, when you do that, then you all work good together.

If you're happy, then you're going to work good together.

First, I want to say, Mr. Powell, I like your twist that you brought up. The what? The twist that you proposed.

The switch?

The twist.

The twist of it. Your twist.

Of having an on-call where they're paid and then they're paid back. the normal rate whenever they show up. The city does have on-call right now, just so you know, and it does work for each of the departments that have it, especially for weekend coverage. But there's nothing that says you have to pay them the premium rate when they're not working. You pay them a lower rate, and then when they get called out, the hours they work is paid at their regular hourly rate. So that's how it truly works because while you have to pay them something and it has to be worth their while, it doesn't have to be a premium high rate, just so you know. And I know you probably know that. So that was not something that's factored into what I'm going to present to you tonight, but that's the first I've heard of it, and we could probably put some numbers together on an option A to address that, and that might mitigate some of this impact that I'm going to show you. Okay. So I'm amenable to listening to that.

And that was a conversation where there's not just one thing. There's several things that play into trying to operate the way we're trying to operate. Right. And I've always been one. to try to kick the can further down the road. If you look at Fort Smith, they're over there taking a pumper out of Station 11. They're laying people off. They're moving stuff around. They're trying to come before me and just out of the fire department. And he's struggling with trying to keep y'all's ISO as low as possible. We don't want to be in that position. I know, as a fireman, we're better off If we can figure out some sort of combination to where we pay the least before we get a full-time Army here.

So what you're going to see tonight is based on a brief conversation that I had with Stuart when we were talking about the presentation for, I wanted to do a pro forma and I wanted to know what his basic needs were and then what the ultimate would be. And two and three were kicked around, and both of those I have pro formas on. I do want to point out, I am going to be showing you some information. The firefighters here, it's going to be boring to you because you know all of this, but for the council members that are not volunteer or not firemen in any way, shape, or form, this comes right from the NFPA. This is their information. I'm going to present it to you. just to give you a brief background of what's traditionally out there and where are we in this. So the very first thing, oh, let me, this should be moving. Okay. Let me go up here. All right. It's a two-hour presentation, so just kidding. Let's get started, Dan.

Let's get started.

Don't worry, about 15 minutes from now, there will be a call come in, and you all will have to leave. So the first thing I want to talk about is the types of fire departments that traditionally are out there. And one of them is the volunteer. Now, technically, we do not have a volunteer one. We have a part-time volunteer, part-time hybrid. The only thing we don't have in that is a career full-time department. So we're kind of in that combination hybrid category. The difference between a volunteer and a career highlights the ways communities protect their citizens for local needs. The thing that I wanted to point out was combination departments bridge the gap with volunteers and career staffing, providing flexibility for communities in transition. And right now, I think we are, let's just say we are the hybrid right now. Because we have the benefits and we have the part-time pay for when they're on call. They get paid for when they work, basically. That's why I'm interested in the on-call. At the best approach depends on balancing resources, risk levels, and communities' unique needs. That's what an FBA says. They also say now they have a question and answer section in their propaganda that they have online. And it says, what are the signs that a volunteer department may need to transition to a combination and career department? That's exactly what we're talking about right now. going away from the volunteer and moving into something that's a little more dependable. So most departments, it says if a call, after call comes in, but there's only one person who's trained to go into the burning building or drive a truck, not much you can do about those fires, but you know you must do something. Well, that's also a medical call. Calls are coming in, no one's responding to them. So now you're starting to think maybe we need to do something different because it isn't working. So most departments that make the transition from an all-volunteer to some level of career simply don't have enough active interior firefighters for a sufficient crew. And that's what I've been hearing so far. They're unable to respond to calls and they're already exhausted after all recruitment and retention strategies. Not sure we've exhausted all of our recruitment and retention strategies, but I know we've tried and there's efforts out there to try to recruit. Your competition is great though. You're dealing with Fort Smith, you're dealing with Rogers, you're dealing with a lot of bigger areas that are drawing them for a lot more pay than what you'd get here. As far as if the department is in this situation, how do I go about the transition? So it all starts with planning and communication, and that's the key, planning. We just can't knee-jerk this according to the information that I gleaned from the answer. I highlighted some of the things. It says it's important that everyone is transparent and set their egos aside to do what's best for the community. That's NFPA's statement, not mine. Together, you will need to decide the best course of action and discuss the timeline, top priorities, and the importance of a consistent communication. You'll also need to determine how the department will be funded and where the funds will come from. And then they talk about the Safer Grant, which is here. Now, Safer Grant is a three-year slow kill if you don't have long-term funding. Because once you start it, you're at a no-man's land now. You ain't going back. Now you're going to have to, something's going to have to give, and you're going to probably have to turn to the taxpayers in order to make that work. Right now, the tax that the fire department gets is for capital. I'm not talking about the county sales tax. That county sales tax is for your staffing side. But you do have a tax, a city sales and use tax, for capital and boots and the apparatus and all that stuff. And that's what you use it for. I will tell you that the... the key to this whole thing is bring it. What are you going to do after the grants over? You can't, that's huge to me because that's three years down the road. There are only three years and then you're a hundred percent having to fund it. And in three years, a lot can happen. Now, if the city doesn't grow exponentially in order to generate additional revenue streams, that's a, that's a kiss of death right there. So let's go to the next one, key considerations for a successful transition. It's crucial to conduct a thorough community risk assessment. You've presented some things tonight that I haven't seen and I knew you probably had because you're putting it together for the Safer Grant now. But that's the start. You need to be looking at don't rely on gut feelings. I have a feeling for this. No. Analyze call volumes. You're doing that. Types of incidents, response times, population density, projected growth. There's the key. The projected growth. That's the unknown right now that we don't have. But if I go back and look at historical, our growth over the last eight years since I've been here has been pretty much nonexistent. In essence, when you look at major leaps and jumps. If you look at the net increase in the services for the water sewer, we're looking at about a 250 household increase, which equates to, if you multiply it by two and a half people, that's about a 500-person jump. Over time, that's not sufficient enough. Or growing, forget the population side, how about growing your commercial tax base? That's another thing that has to happen. So revenue just doesn't come because prices raise. It tends to be the opposite. Sometimes you'll reach a peak, and then people will stop buying things that they think or determine is discretionary. So furthermore, the evidence-based approach helps build trust and ensures reach.