San Joaquin County Grand Jury
• 2010-2011
• Agency Response
City of Stockton Response Stockton Fire Department Minimum Staffing*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 2 findings
F1
Page 1
Tracy, Manteca and Lodi Fire Departments safely staff engines and trucks with three firefighters each. Stockton staff engines with four firefighters and trucks with five firefighters. CITY RESPONSE The City partially agrees with this finding. The issue of safety is a term that is not easily defined. The word safely, as used in the Findings is equally hard to define as the job of firefighting assumes a wide variance of risk at any level of staffing in any community. Given our resources at the City, we believe a more accurate term for 'safely' would be 'adequately'. Assessing the safety of a community is best defined after conducting a thorough risk analysis of a communities target hazards; age and construction of its community; the adopted general plan of the community; the infrastructure (roads and water system); a time/distance/and travel time study based on past emergency response data; and with the knowledge of the capabilities of the existing or proposed workforce. Of course, all of this must be viewed through the lens of the community's willingness to pay for services. The relative safety provided to a community by emergency response staff is determined by many factors beyond that of staffing levels alone. Ultimately, the final decision on staffing and deployment is in large part based upon what a community can or desires to afford, relative to the risks and levels of services it may wish to provide. In the end, our recently adopted budget includes similar reduced staffing levels. ٤, GRAND JURY
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
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Reduce the staffing on Stockton fire engines to three firefighters and trucks to four firefighters. CITY RESPONSE The City of Stockton has implemented this recommendation. The Stockton Fire Department reduced staffing to three firefighters on engines and four firefighters on trucks as of July 1, 2011 after the amended Memorandum of Understanding was tentatively in place between the City and the Stockton Fire Fighters' Union. GRAND JURY
F2
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The cost savings by eliminating one position from each of the Stockton Fire Department Engine and Truck Companies on all three shifts would be a savings of $5,000,000 -$7,000,000. CITY RESPONSE The City partially agrees with this finding. The adopted 2011-2012 City of Stockton Annual Budget reflects a reduction in staffing and employee benefits for the Fire Department of approximately $19,000,000 less than the baseline budget estimate of $59,000,000 for 2011-2012. Stockton Fire Department General Fund Budget 2009-10 Actual $47.5 million 2010-11 Adopted Budget $46.9 million 2011-12 Baseline Budget $59 million 2011-12 Adopted Budget $40 million Budgeting for personnel and other costs associated with providing fire safety service is complex. The ultimate outcome of the reduced staffing, if modeled solely on the
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
Page 1
Create a relief pool from the staffing reduction that would cover firefighters on leave rather than pay overtime. CITY RESPONSE This recommendation has been partially implemented. The Stockton Fire Department has operated a relief pool for several years as an augmentation to daily staffing to reduce overtime. This relief pool has recently been expanded to further reduce overtime, but will not eliminate all overtime. Although staffing levels are now managed by the City, the City must also manage the financial and safety risks associated with staffing an adequate number of fire apparatus on a daily basis throughout the City. The size and number of a relief pool is a daily staffing cost to the city and if all members of the relief pool are not utilized, then the daily staffing cost is higher than what it might have to be on any given day. Therefore, the City of Stockton has found that a strategy that balances the use of a relief pool and reduced overtime dollars is the most cost effective means to maintain an acceptable level of staffing throughout the city on a daily basis. BOB DEIS CITY MANAGER Cc: City Council . 11-0234 Resolution No. STOCKTON CITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION APPROVING THE CITY OF STOCKTON'S RESPONSE TO THE 2010- 2011 CIVIL GRAND JURY FINAL REPORT AND DIRECTING THE CITY MANAGER TO SIGN THE RESPONSE ON BEHALF OF THE CITY OF STOCKTON AND TRANSMIT THE RESPONSE TO THE PRESIDING JUDGE OF THE SUPERIOR COURT OF SAN JOAQUIN COUNTY The 2010-2011 Civil Grand Jury for the County of San Joaquin issued its
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.