 Welcome back to the Davis Media Access Studio. I'm Autumn Labay-Renell, and we're here with another episode of The City Considerers, and I'm really delighted to welcome our fire chief, Daryl Arbuthnott, who is here with us for the first time. I am, thanks for having me. Yeah, welcome to DMA. So you're somewhat of a newbie here in town still. You arrived last July, I believe. And after a very storied career down in Los Angeles. So I imagine that we're a bit different here. Slightly. Much smaller town, I'm starting to get used to. But I don't miss the traffic in LA. Yeah, I bet, I bet. So we've been chatting in the ramp up to this, and there's a lot of stuff to cover. I noticed one of the things you wanted to talk about was sort of what makes for an effective firefighting department? Yeah, there's really three key pillars that emphasize the strong. Actually, it's in the industry. It could be the airline industry. And it's well-trained people, properly staffed, and properly equipped. If you take any of those pillars away, you're struggling. And that's one of the things I looked at when I arrived here in the city of Davis. I looked at the fire department to see where they were struggling. And of course, fortunately, the three of those pillars are being addressed. But they're just not where they need to be yet. We're still working our way towards that. Right. So you arrived here at a time when the city was transitioning away from shared management with the UC Davis Fire Department. And I imagine there are a lot of things in the wake of that that sort of need changing and need evaluation. And one of the things you talked about earlier was building relationships. And so you're doing that by being here and talking to the community. But you mentioned kind of doing some directed outreach. Tell us about that. Yeah, I've done on two levels. One, I've reached out. I'm reaching out to the communities because I really want to understand what the community, the level of service they want to focus on that they need. And the other is with the regional partners, the campus, Woodland and those other fire and police agencies, we did some training in January with a lot of these. But we had like 70 participants. And we did some kind of incident management training. Just in the event we have something large scale incident, we know how to work together. From the community's perspective, they don't really, they're not as concerned about what patch looks like. They're more concerned about the collective effort to solve the problem. And who shows up to help them in a time of need. And I imagine that's your main concern too. You mentioned systems need updating, technology needs updating, run us through that. What are we dealing with here in Davis? So the fire department across the country have advanced, the fire service advanced in embracing technology. And it just hasn't caught on here yet, but we're looking at direction. For example, fire apparatus should have, they call them mobile data terminals, MDTs. And those are ways of accurately tracking our status. It picks up the closest resource. So when anyone calls in, comes in, the closest fire resource or emits resource response as opposed to just going by who's normally in that area, which may be a further way unit. So these are enhancements that are gonna benefit the community, but it is, it does come at a cost. How does it work now? How do you let someone know you're on the way, so speak. Pony Express kind of thing. We, the fire captains, what they do now is they do a verbal update. And unfortunately, that does not give us the most accurate time tracker that's necessary. And the other area this is a problem is patient records. When we do it, we need to have that stuff on electronic system. And we're investigating that now to purchase some kind of software system where we can automate all these processes. The one thing you always hear about and with regard to fire departments is response time. I mean, having attended a lot of city council meetings, those are the two words that I hear the most, which has to do with where our fire stations are located and how many of them there are. So what's your assessment of the sort of the condition of our fire stations and how they're serving the community right now? Interesting question that you've raised. There's several things that go into response times. And one of them, like you mentioned, fire stations. Two of the three fire stations in the city of Davis have pretty much gone beyond their life cycle. It's usually 50 years. We've got two plus 50 years and then one 40 years. So we're looking at the feasibility of replacing the stations. And I say that to say, if we strategically placed them properly, when I first got here, they mentioned about having a fourth station for city coverage. We could actually properly place them with just three stations and still meet our response time criteria and have good city coverage. But that's another challenge in and of itself, because that's like a six-year process. Long-term strategic planning. But the whole footprint of the city has changed radically in those 50 years. That's true. And what I did was we looked at some potential sites that also allow for the city growth. And it looks like the city, if it were going to expand, which I understand it's almost possible here and there sometimes, the Northwest and the Northeast parts of the city, there's area for expansion. And that's where we look at putting these stations so that we wouldn't have to create another station if they did expand. So kind of reconfiguring what we have versus looking at a wholesale expansion. You also mentioned earlier aerial ladder trucks and reconfiguration. So in addition to technology and looking at the stations, you've got to look at the equipment and how people train on it, right? That's another good point. So today, we have a Rescue, Rescue 31, which is a large fire apparatus that we, it primarily runs medical calls. So it's probably the wrong type of apparatus for the mission that it primarily runs. So we're looking at purchasing a couple of smaller squads, almost like Squad 51 used to see on TV years ago. You're dating yourself in the process. This is what I heard from other people. And it will carry medical stuff. They can still do firefighting and also some light technical rescue. So that's what that. The aerial ladder trucks specifically, there's only one immediately on this island. I'm calling the campus and the city, which is, it probably needs more staffing itself, but the city itself, due to the threats in the city, the apartments, the multi-apartment size, big commercials, they need to have aerial ladder truck. They need to have a second one. So my push is to get a second aerial ladder truck. And obviously that means a little more staffing, but ultimately it'll provide the best service for the city as a whole and the campus. That's a good point. We're not a city with skyscrapers, for example, but we do have many MDUs, those apartment buildings. Well, like the winds they had during the brush season in the Bay Area had that been here, it's not just one unit that's going to burn. It's going to be multiple units. So we need to get ahead of it. And it requires roof work, truck work, ventilation to have that take place. On that note, I know that some of our city firefighters went out and helped with the wildfire problems. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yes, that was on a Monday morning. And I came to where I get to work about five in the morning and the winds were howling pretty bad. We knew there was going to be a wind event. And I struggled that morning because we got a request, we got immediate need, meeting houses were burning, we're threatened. And I made the decision to initially hold on to all my companies here for the city of Davis for fear that we have a problem here. I sent them away. We're not going to get them back right away. But three days later, when the winds died down in our region, but we're still having problems there, then I sent an engine company there. So I have to balance that deployment request. It's very tough, but I've done that before many times. Sure, you're the fire chief of Davis. That has to be your first priority. Tell us a little bit about how, if we call in for help and it goes to dispatch, what happens with the call? Diagram that for us, if you would. So today, the Davis Fire Department gets dispatched through Davis PD Dispatch. So the same dispatcher as the dispatch, Davis Police dispatch Davis Fire. The rest of the county, Yolo County, are dispatched through Yolo County Dispatch, including all the fire resources, which makes us kind of the oddball. When we need resources, it's a phone call. It's not an automatic computer readout or request. It has to be a phone call made. And our company officers have to today still do manual updates. One of the other downsides to the current system is that Yolo County has the ability to do pre-arrival instructions. So if you're calling in for a heart attack, they'll stay on the phone with you and explain what you need to do to help survive somebody. Davis Dispatch, they're not trained to that, certified to that level, so they can't provide that. And there's a host of other benefits of going to Yolo County. So we're looking at the feasibility of doing that cost and ease technology and integration, those sorts of things to see if it's possible. Right. Did you always know you wanted to be a firefighter? Yeah, I know you had a setup question. It is a setup question. Yeah, when I told the story, when I was 13, I snuck on Channel 7 Lot in Los Angeles, and I watched Jerry Dunphy, a pillar of broadcast, do a newscast. And from there, I was just mesmerized and wanted to do that as a profession. When I got into college, that was still in my mind, but I saw a flyer that said be a firefighter, and I thought, I'll just put an application. Got pulled in a different direction. I had to ask you because we're sitting here at a TV studio. Great question. So what else would you like us to know about the fire department? And it's people, I'd like to know sort of what you're most impressed with so far in your relatively short time here, and what your visions and hopes are moving forward, leading this department. There's two things I'm really impressed with. I had heard when I got here was that this department is very engaged with the community. And you hear that all the time. Last Saturday, this last past Saturday, they put on an event called the CrabFest Feast. And it was so well attended, they had to turn 50 people away. It was just a phenomenal event. They do a turkey giveaway in November. I'm just amazed on how they're connected to the community. And the community loves their fire department. That's the first thing. And the second is the quality of people that work for this department. Again, I come from a department that had 3,400 firefighters. Wow. And here in Davis, we have. There's 36. If you count the administrative staff, 43. So a factor of 1,000 difference. It's not too much different. But I can tell you, every single one, and I see them on a regular basis, are just professional. They want to do the best job. Their heart is in the city doing the best job here. The few of them that grew up and still live here, their passion is just unparalleled, unmatched with many. In spite of all the challenges and hurdles they went through over the last eight years or so with different leaderships and so on and so forth, they still are engaged in wanting to do the best job possible. So I feel very honored to be their leader, to be honest with you. One of my favorite things is when they come through the neighborhood with Santa on the fire truck at Christmas time. I can't tell you. I live on a block that has a lot of families with young kids and the squeals of delight. And I mean, it's really a magical thing that they do. And I think about them passing the boot, standing out there at the intersection and raising money for families who might go without at the holidays. It's really, that's right. They have like three charities that they raise funds for. And again, I'm just very impressed. This last crap thing, I think they're roughly around $12,000 a raise for cancer awareness, I believe it is. So, and again, in Los Angeles, there's different things that they do to raise funds. But, and it's just, it's so diluted, it's really tough. Here, you can see the concentrated focus. They bring in sororities to assist and just all these different community people that are, I'm just not used to, I guess, because I come from such a big city, it's hard to imagine it. So I'm very impressed with it. Yeah, Los Angeles is sort of this amorphous blob. I mean, I grew up in Southern California and it's like, yes, there is LA proper, but every little town attached to it, it's all LA. It's got its own personality. I know, it does. What can we do finally? Is there anything coming up? I think you mentioned there's some openings coming up. So how can people get information about that? So, currently I have one battalion chief, two captains and three firefighter vacancies. And for the firefighter vacancies, we go outside. And we published that last month where we've got roughly 200 candidates, we're gonna dwindle that down and look at promoting from that perspective, at least hiring them. We'll train them internally. The captains in the chief's test, interesting enough, the last few tests they had, there was very little interest. This test, I've got almost everybody's applying for every promotion. And I don't know if that's due to my leadership or just their interest in seeing the department move forward, that they wanna be part of it. In any case, it makes it great to see the energy with the department push that way. I suspect it's both, especially if it's that much of a sea change from what it was the last time. It was before, yeah. The only other thing I did wanna mention, and I didn't wanna skip over was, I did do an assessment of the department and I did my own evaluation and I presented at council last week. We also contract it with a outside consultant to do a standards of cover. A standards of cover is an evaluation of the department, its resources, personnel, the threats in the community and how those things match and mesh up. And they'll come back with recommendations of technology, staffing, ABCD, and then we'll present that to council. It'll give council an understanding of the state of the department, where it's at and what it needs, and then we'll look at how we fund that moving forward. So, I'm looking forward to that report. It's due in mid-late summer. Okay, thanks for dotting all those I's and crossing all those T's and thank you for coming on the show today. Our time is winding down, but you're an important member of our community now and I really wanted our viewers to get to know you a little bit. So, I'd love to come back. We will have you back and let us know whenever you wanna come on. So, thanks so much for joining us. And thank you for joining us here on The City Considerz and you can find out more about our fire department by going to thecityofdavis.org and I believe there's even a menu bar for fire that'll get you there. And by the way, little kids love the tours and the hats and your firefighters are my kids. We did that many times. Your firefighters are very gracious. Thanks so much for tuning in here at Davis Media Access. Take care.