Os Altos Hil Los Altos Hills County Fire District Filed P.o. Box 1766 Los Altos, Ca 94023-1766 Oct 07 2011*

It is extremely costly to equip a fire department for only the occasional fire response; the County and fifteen towns/cities have not been proactive in challenging fire departments to adopt changes that are more cost effective and that better serve their communities. Further, unions are more interested in job preservation than in providing the right mix of capabilities at a reasonable cost, using scare tactics to influence the public and fostering firefighter unwillingness to collaborate with EMS. We disagree with Finding 1. We, as a board believe that we have been responsive to change, as has the agency we contract with - Santa Clara County Fire. In 1996 we dissolved our small agency and began contracting with a much larger agency (Santa Clara County Fire) for emergency services. This change improved resources available to our district residents and gave us a more regional approach to our emergency services. As we did in 1996, 2006, and will in 2016 (upon contract renewal), we review the services and response criteria and develop it to meet our specialized and diverse needs from standard emergency medical response to wild lands firefighting. We do not interact with the Union – we contract at a fixed fee for services and therefor do not have sufficient information to respond to the Union part of the question. In our limited exposure to the County fire system (we have one station) we see that the firefighters collaborate and work well with the EMS personnel. Serving the town of Los Altos Hills and the unincorporated areas generally referred to as the Loyola and San Antonio Hills

Whether the emergency responder is a firefighter-paramedic or an EMS paramedic matters little to the person with the medical emergency; using firefighter-paramedics in firefighting equipment as first responders to all non-police emergencies is unnecessarily costly when less expensive paramedics on ambulances possess the skills needed to address the 96% of calls that are not fire related. As to Finding 3, we disagree. Our district is unique and very diverse; we respond to many types of calls from freeway accidents to remote wild land fires and rescues. Our district is diverse and has remote areas. We believe emergency responders should be well-equipped with the proper tools in order to respond appropriately.. Upon completion of a call they may be dispatched to another type of call and need the proper equipment to respond accordingly,. Arriving to one of these remote areas without the necessary equipment and personnel will cause delays to emergency services and endanger our district residents' safety and welfare.