City of Mountain View*

It is extremely costly to equip a fire department for only the occasional fire response. The County and 15 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 tactics to influence the public and fostering firefighter unwillingness to collaborate with EMS. The City partially disagrees with this finding. The City of Mountain View agrees that appropriate staffing levels and equipment require a significant investment. The City takes seriously its responsibilities of ensuring expeditious response to emergencies with thoroughly trained personnel. We also take seriously our responsibility for ensuring fiscally accountable services. To achieve success in both areas, the City has trained its Fire Department employees as "multi-disciplined/all-risk" emergency responders. This means that our Firefighters and response units are not only prepared to fight fires, but because they are on duty 24/7, they also are trained and equipped to effectively Recycled Paper mitigate medical emergencies requiring both Advanced Life Support (ALS) and Basic Life Support (BLS) services. Additionally, our personnel are trained to respond to emergencies which require specialized education and skill sets. These include hazardous materials response, technical rescue response, homeland security and natural disasters. Each fire station has been strategically located to ensure rapid response times with individuals who are trained at all of the aforementioned response capabilities. Finally, the City will continue to work with the emergency responders who belong to Local 1965 to be partners as we ensure high-quality and seamless service, while remaining cognizant of the need to manage City resources responsibly.

Based on Santa Clara County's fluctuating demand for emergency services, contractually based minimum staffing requirements are not warranted and hinder fire chiefs in effectively managing firefighter staffing to meet time-of-day, day-of-week and season-of- year demand. This wastes money and may drive station closure as budgets continue to erode. The City partially disagrees with this finding. It is true that calls for emergency services do fluctuate, but it is difficult to predict where and when an emergency response will occur. Because of this, we constantly review our calls for service and how effectively our deployment model is addressing them. There are three factors that influence the outcome of an emergency call for service: 1. Properly trained responders. 2. Properly equipped responders. 3. Response time—of Nos. 1 and 2. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) prescribes best practice benchmarks regarding staffing standards. They are based on minimum levels necessary for "safe, effective and efficient emergency operations." Instead of staffing to the NFPA standard of four on-duty personnel per engine and five on-duty personnel per ladder truck, the City of Mountain View staffs each unit with three personnel and then augments our response with a two-person rescue squad. The City believes the end result is greater efficiency without degrading our effectiveness. In January 2011, the Fire Department conducted a comprehensive review of dispatching procedures along with the type and number of units sent per call. At the conclusion of this review, a change in the way we process and dispatch EMS calls was incorporated into our procedures. Instead of overwhelming the response with personnel and equipment, we now triage the call differently. This adjustment provides us the capability to send the closest appropriate units, instead of everything, at the beginning of the dispatch. The result of this change has been greater efficiency by scaling our response to meet the specific needs of the emergency.

Whether the emergency responder is a firefighter-paramedic or an EMT-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 90 percent of calls that are not fire-related. This finding requires further analysis. This finding lacks sufficient detail to fully address the issue to which it refers. We are unaware of any supporting data or examples of currently operating emergency service delivery systems where only ambulance-based personnel respond to 90 percent of non-police emergencies. Significant review and study of the implications of this kind of system would need to be undertaken.

Emergency callers care less about seeing their city/town name on the equipment door than receiving timely assistance when needed, and a wide variety of consolidation opportunities offer cities ways to deliver emergency response service at a reduced cost and without compromising service response times. The City of Mountain View agrees with this finding.