City begins looking at Fire Department staffing needs

Chief says under current staffing department can no longer adequately staff week days

By Kellen Olshefski

Editor

With staffing shortage on the fire side of Elkhorn’s Fire and EMS services, Elkhorn Public Safety Committee began discussions Monday on what can be done to ensure the fire department is adequately staffed at all times.

Previously, the department faced a void in EMS staffing, something Elkhorn Fire Chief Rod Smith said was fixed for the most-part by the addition of an extra full-time person.

Smith said though it isn’t always the case, for the most part with Fire Department staffing being paid-on call there’s only one or two people available for calls during the daytime hours. He said a lot of times this has to deal with paid-on-call staff’s daytime jobs.

Smith said many of the paid-on-call staff work out of town and the ones that do work in town, a lot of times their employers will not allow them to leave work for a fire call.

“The day of the volunteer-on-call person is going by the wayside,” he said, noting of the people they’ve interviewed and the maybe 15 they’ve accepted in the past five years, they have maybe half of them left.

“It’s becoming an issue,” he said. “One way or another we have to fix it and the only way I see to do it is staffing.”

Smith’s report to the committee states the department is experiencing a lower turnout of paid-on-call staff for structure fires due to the decrease in staff, with 14 being the average in 2011 and 10 the average today.

“The lower turnout is jeopardizing the safety of staff and increasing the reliance on mutual aid fro neighboring departments for structure fire calls,” he wrote. With neighboring departments experiencing similar shortages, he wrote they might not be available to respond to mutual aid calls, something becoming more increasingly common because other departments don’t want to leave their own coverage areas uncovered.

“We were in Whitewater earlier in January and out of the 17 departments in the first three alarms, half of them passed,” he said. “That’s why it ended up going to six because we couldn’t get anyone to respond, because it’s daytime.”

Additionally, Smith’s report notes while the city currently has 25 single-role firefighters and 17 single-role EMTs, it only has four personnel classified as dual-role, allowing them to take on the duties of both sides of emergency services.

Smith said with several options outlined in his report to the committee – including the use of cross-trained dual-role firefighter/EMTs for full-time or “paid-on-premise” dual – he wanted direction from the city prior to putting in large amounts of work towards one option or another.

Smith said the most cost-effective way to handle the issue would likely be paid-on-premise staffing, though he said the pool of these types of personnel available is “drying up,” as a lot of departments are transitioning to this type of staffing. However, he said the top of the line would be to have firefighter/paramedics in the station, the most expensive option.

City Administrator Sam Tapson said with the city not being able to afford to jump into a full-time operation – something he said would look like the police department, well over $1 million to operate – city fire and EMS services might need to change the process incrementally.

Tapson said paid-on-premise has worked in Lake Geneva, noting full-time firefighters in nearby Illinois are 24-hours on, 48-hours off, and are often willing to work their two days off.

“The most sort of feasible approach is to figure out how to incrementalize, go to paid-on-premises and try to transition some other things,” he said, noting even if they hired contractually, like done with EMS, it would likely be another $190,000.

Smith said however, adding an additional full-time city employee, of which the city would pay 63 percent of the total cost, would help cover the gap and allow for the employee to be used for other Fire Department business, such as fire inspections and prevention programs.

Other options discussed included consolidating with neighboring fire departments or the county as a whole, creating a countywide fire department, a concept that hasn’t been fully explored at this time and would likely be considered more of a long-term solution.

“Do we want to be proactive or reactive,” Smith said. “We can’t be having missed calls and stuff like that, that doesn’t look good for the department or the city.”

The committee aims to continue discussions on the topic, engaging other area and state fire departments to gather information on how similar concerns have been handled.