Lawrence-Douglas County Fire
Medical
Chief of Department
Lawrence, KS 66046
Office 785-830-7003
Fax 785-830-7090
April 12, 2007
To: David Corliss
City Manager
Craig Weinaug
County Administrator
From: Mark Bradford
Chief
Subject: FY 2008 Budget Request
Please find enclosed the FY 2008 Fire Medical Operating and Capital Improvement Budget request. We have identified the challenges that the city has in operating within the City’s revenue picture. The total operating budget requested for the department is $16,804,455. With 148 FTE, we strive to provide prevention, fire suppression, hazardous materials, water rescue, high angle rescue, confined space, and emergency medical services. Last year we exceeded 8,900 incident responses for service and more than 300 public appearances with an estimated 10,000 citizen contacts. Our missions are vital to the overall comfort safety and quality of life for our community. The services that we provide fundamentally support the goals established by the City Commission.
The most critical issue still facing the department remains the need for an adequate replacement program of our fire apparatus fleet. During the spring of 2007, we began developing realistic replacement program that maintains the safety of our personnel and provides the necessary resources to ensure adequate coverage of the City. Currently, we are experiencing downtimes that limit our reserve apparatus availability to one, or in some situations, zero. The lack of adequate apparatus has the potential to raise the City’s ISO rating and to cause a decrease in community and firefighter safety. Our department’s Confined Space/Structural Collapse response equipment is being transported on two flat bed trailers due to a blown engine in a 1975 retrofitted fire engine. This area of infrastructure needs our immediate attention.
In review of our overtime expenditures in 2007, it appears we will approach or exceed our budget request. In 2007, we requested three FTEs in the operations division to cover the accrued leave of our workforce. We are again asking for this increase in staffing at a cost of $165,945, which will reduce our overtime expenditure by approximately 20%, or a budget request of $240,000 as compared to $300,000.
As part of our Self Assessment process of agency accreditation, we have determined that we do not meet federal and NFPA guidelines for Technician Level Technical Rescue services. We are asking for a multi-year, phased-in approach to begin training and equipping our department to ensure that we are responding to Hazardous Materials, Water Rescue, Rope, Confined Space, Trench and Structural Collapse/Heavy Rescue operations in a safe and efficient manner. Currently, we cannot provide the Technician level of service that I believe is the standard and accepted level of response.
We desperately need to provide our members with the technology to perform data entry in the field. As you are aware, Douglas County has agreed to provide the software and six electronic tablets for patient care reporting in the 2007 FY budget. The City deferred the purchase of six tablets to FY 2008. Electronic tablet data collection will allow the department the ability to streamline our data analysis requirements.
Lastly, we are again asking for our Prevention Lieutenant position to be upgraded to align the position with our operations and training divisions. This position has been reviewed by the City’s Job Evaluation Committee with a recommendation to re-class the position.
We look forward to the opportunity to discuss our requests as they relate to increasing our efficiency and meeting the current and new demands on the City’s Fire Medical services.