Santa Clara Mayor*

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.] City Response to Finding 1: The City agrees with the finding. It is costly to equip a fire department but, as with any first line of defense, emergency workers must be trained and available in order to prevent losses that could exceed the cost of providing emergency services. Paid fire departments came into existence because of the inability of volunteer departments to protect growing communities and their assets. The Santa Clara Fire Department has undergone many substantial changes in order to better serve the public and preserve limited financial resources. Recent changes include reduced staffing, and updated automatic and mutual aid agreements to supplement lower staffing levels. We recognize the need for our Fire Department to move beyond the old model of waiting for the occasional emergency response. We also place a much stronger emphasis on Fire Prevention, Hazardous Materials Mitigation and Public Education. In the City of Santa Clara, the firefighters union and employees have cooperated with City Management and Fire Administration in implementing cost effective deployment of staffing levels. Mayor and Council Offices 1500 Warburton Avenue Santa Clara, CA 95050 (408) 615-2250 FAX (408) 241-6771 www.santaclaraca.gov Honorable Richard J. Loftus, Jr. August 31, 2011

Based on SCC'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, season of year demand. This wastes money and may drive station closure as budgets continue to erode. City Response to Finding 2: The City agrees with this finding. The City of Santa Clara does not have contractually based minimum staffing requirements. Santa Clara's flexible staffing model that was developed eight years ago has allowed us to adjust our response level to suit the demand for service. It has also significantly reduced our overtime costs.

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. City Response to Finding 3: The City agrees with the finding. However, the person with the medical emergency does care about the quality and the timeliness of the emergency response. We are unaware of any qualitative analysis that has been done between career Firefighter EMS responders and private sector EMS responders. We do know that our EMS responders receive a 97 – 98% approval rating from those we serve. We also know that the private EMS provider is contractually obligated to arrive on scene within 11 minutes Honorable Richard J. Loftus, Jr. August 31, 2011 and 59 seconds 90% of the time. This is nearly three times as long as it takes Fire Department EMS personnel to arrive. If our citizens wanted the quicker response times and the private provider were to provide a similar response time as Fire EMS personnel, they would have to staff more ambulances which would drive up the cost of service. These costs would then be passed on to our citizens.

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 services at a reduced cost and without compromising service response times. City Response to Finding 4: The City agrees with the finding. It should be noted that under a consolidation model, Santa Clara probably would be sending aid to other agencies far more often than we receive aid. This is better for the County as a whole, but may not be as effective for Santa Clara taxpayers as their Fire Department would respond out of the city more often. There are, however, specialty areas of response such as Haz Mat response, high angle rescue, confined space rescue, and more that should be regionalized in order to more efficiently handle high risk, low frequency emergency events within the County.