 Please take the roll. Come here. Okay. Ballinger. Here. Getters. Here. Oran. Here. Ram roll. Excuse. Donahue. Here. Drawing. Excuse. Heidemann. Here. Herman. Here. Cascio. Excuse. Hosea. Excuse. Mabinovsky. Here. Rob. Excuse. Schneider. Excuse. There is a quorum. Please join me in my allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you very much. John. Andrea. Chairman. Yes. Is this being presented on TV? There's somebody back there. Okay. So the people that aren't here will be able to bring the president again later. Okay. Great. Thank you. I'll entertain a motion to approve the minutes of the December 12th meeting. Second. Okay. Any discussion? Seeing none, all signified for saying aye. Aye. Those opposed. Thank you. Public forum, is there anyone who would like to speak to the committee of the whole this evening on the items that are on the agenda? Seeing none. We'll go down to item one or two one. Firefighters union comments on the future fire department alternatives. Cal Hughes, you may remember me from previous presentations. This is a Joel Johns root was also a firefighter at the Sheboygan fire department at station five, both of us. Last week, I wasn't able to attend, but I know that chase was here two weeks ago. I'm sorry. That chase was here and you had asked him to give some sort of feedback and direction on the chief's plan. That was my understanding. Is that about correct? Yep. Okay. We did meet with the chief. We had a good meeting. We looked at his proposal. We looked at his plan and we really, if you remember back to when we made our presentation, we had stated that we had immediate goals and that we had future plans. Our immediate goals were more along the lines. Like we had said, no more two person stations and getting the battalion chiefs back on 24s. The chief's plan is pretty short term and meets those criteria. So we really didn't have much difference in the short term. We liked the plan. We did wish that there were a couple of small changes. Maybe the battalion chiefs coming back on the 24s at a quicker basis. I think they understand that. You guys understand that because we're telling you again. But like we had said back in July, this didn't happen. We didn't get to the staffing level overnight. It's not going to correct itself overnight. So a little bit of patience by us might help. But we also had some ideas that we were able to share with the chief that would decrease the workload in the front office, increase the workload on our end. Those discussions were, I won't speak out of school and speak for the chief, but those discussions were fruitful. We don't have any agreements. It's only been eight days since the last time anybody was here. We don't have any agreements, anything solid, but we did have good discussion. So that being said, we liked the plan. We liked the plan overall. And we can support it in at least its principle phase at this point in time. We would like to work with him more in the future on shoring it up and maybe making some alterations to it. But in its concept, it seems to be a good plan. Is that about right? Right. All right. That being said, I don't think I really have. We didn't, again, short timetable. I don't want to make a presentation or do anything fancy for you this time, but we would be willing to entertain any questions you might have. Thank you, Chairman. Last time I spoke with Chase and I had him involved at the very beginning when I presented this idea of a study. I had the fire chief invite. In fact, I spoke with you and Chase at the same time. He and you were in favor of the study as long as there was no predetermined outcome on the study. And as long as it was a completely independent bias study and there was no predetermined outcome by me or anybody else on the council, whether it would be to reduce the number of personnel or increase or reduce the number of fire stations or increase, I mean, there was, that was the conditions that were set by you and by Chase. And I think in my intention, that's, you know, I don't have any preconceived outcome for this study that, you know, we hopefully will embark on. I'm completely neutral. I'm a supporter of the fire department, but I think we need something that's more long term than the 2020 plan that's presented. And I think we need something that's a little more comprehensive in that, in narrow scope is what has been presented to. So I just wanted to confirm that you guys were still in favor of ... I would say that nothing from that conversation has changed. Okay. Great. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you very much. We're going to go down to 3-1, RC number 265-1617 by Public Protection of Safety, your committee to whom is referred, resolution number 129-1617 by Alderman Theo, authorizing the purchasing agent to enter into a contract for professional services related to the performances of an operational and department structure study for the Sheboygan Fire Department presentation by Steve Knight of Fitchin Associates. Steve? Well, my IT help has stepped out. So I'll do a brief introduction while I pause. But thank you very much for having me. I'll give you a little background on myself. I retired as a third generation firefighter as an assistant chief from St. Petersburg Fire and Rescue down in Florida. I started as a firefighter paramedic, worked my way up ranks, served over operations, safety and training and EMS for different portions of time. And I also worked with the fire accreditation group for about 10 years as a peer team leader, peer assessor, and ultimately as part of their consulting arm that does deployment, facilitation and strategic planning. After I retired, I worked for the International City County Managers Association for about a year and a half or two years in their program before I had an opportunity to move over and join Fitchin Associates. So that's a little bit about my career. Academically, I have a PhD from the University of South Florida. I have a master's degree in public administration and then my bachelor's degree is in fire and safety engineering. So that's a little bit about myself. And our team or our firm, Fitchin Associates, has been around for 30 years in the public safety arena. They had their origins on the EMS side many, many years ago and we've certainly branched out for fire and EMS, police and billing, ambulance billing and other things like that. So we have a pretty robust program with Fitchin Associates. So I will just go ahead and proceed without my neat PowerPoint. So what I can tell you about our study then is we like to describe ourselves as a high engagement consultancy firm. So we understand that when there's multiple stakeholders as a parent with your union involvement between the city and the fire department and all the community stakeholders, we spend considerable time making sure that we make the rounds and do the face time to make sure that we do structured interviews and understand what the real dynamics are in the community. And we work hard also to make sure that we identify and accurately capture what the community expectations for service are. And that's a foundational piece for what we do. As Alderman mentioned, we are an objective, unbiased firm and because of that we use a very risk based approach to how we design studies. So each community is unique. There's not a one size fits all. You want it back? Okay. Excuse me. So we start at the risk and make sure that we design a deployment strategy and a staffing model for your department that meets a unique expectations that your community has as well as the unique risks that your community has. And when I said one size doesn't fit all, because as you go from community to community, expectations for service can vary considerably where you may have less affluent communities and invest very heavily in their public safety and you may have very affluent communities that invest less in their public safety. Some of the foundational pieces like your structures, the type of structures, whether or not there's any kind of fire protection in place. Your capability from your road network and infrastructure. There's a lot of pieces that make each community unique and we make sure that we track through all of those and make sure that we design the system that's appropriate for you. So that's our general approach. As far as the deliverables, we'll look at the full scope of the organization. We'll start with the risk and back up through deployment and then we'll get back to the rest of the organization to make sure that all the support pieces are there and in place for you to be successful. But a big piece of our dialogue that we'll have, especially with the policy group, is to make sure that we have properly captured and articulate what the community expectations are. So that we build the system that's designed to meet the expectations of the community. And in that we'll give you some broad frameworks to look at, as the scope requested, to look at some foundational recommendations that are out there like 1710, ISO, the fire accreditation model, maybe what the ambulance service looks like, but we'll balance all those competing interests so that you can establish policy for where you want your service level to be appropriately on the front side and then we can build the system to meet that. As far as the deliverables, I started to say when we say we're a high engagement firm and it's clear just from that brief introduction from the union, our style will meet very well with that because we like to run it purely objective and highly transparent. That's our process. So once we do, it's very data driven. Once we get the data report back, that'll be one of the deliverables and actually the first deliverable. And then the department will have an opportunity to get the data report because the data is what we're going to base decisions off of. So we need to make sure that the department and us and the city have all agreed that the data passes a common sense test. It's accurately reflecting the performance. And then once we're all in agreement that the data is accurate to use, then we'll use that to build our decision models from there. The second deliverable will be similar to that and that's a GIS report. So we'll use your data, use that in a GIS format and look at all your station placements, things like that. In relation to how your calls are distributed as well as in relation to how your risk is distributed across the community. And we'll compare and contrast the different station areas to make sure that the desired service levels are commensurate across the community and if they're not commensurate, then we'll have a discussion and a dialogue about why they aren't and what strategies or alternatives there are to move that pendulum one way or the other. So once we get the data report, the GIS report, then we'll go ahead and we'll move forward. Once those two pieces have been reviewed and kind of agreed upon, if you will, then we'll move forward and actually wrap up the overall comprehensive study. Your RFP really broke it out into two phases. So the first phase is really more of the operational piece. And the second phase is more about function, looking at your structure in the organization, the administrative capacity, et cetera. But a big component of that is the ambulance billing and the sustainability and viability of the ambulance program. So we'll make sure that we evaluate that very, very thoroughly and give you the pros and cons of any alternatives to the status quo and make sure that the revenue streams, the service delivery, the clinical capabilities and delivery model all match. So it's a broad scope process for how we like to deliver the reports. And again, it's highly engaged and highly transparent. So we'll make sure that we're in continuous communication and make sure that we get this moving forward. David, do you have his... Got our fingers crossed? That's okay. We're good. So one of the elements I just wanted, if this came up and worked, and it was in our proposal for your review, one of the elements that we have found to be highly successful to drive the policy discussion in discourse about where your service levels are, is we use a marginal utility model, really from the economic world, if you will, that looks at all your station placements and we can articulate a cost and value of your investment from all the different resources in their place, in the station placements. So that if you had to choose anything other than the status quo or had to make any adjustments, there's a very easy way to articulate how and where to invest your dollars or reallocate resources to make sure that you get the desired outcome in the service level that you're going to design. So that's the overall approach and I don't want to neglect the other team members, so I'll briefly go over that. You had my introduction. One of the other members that I'll bring on this, on the project would be Dr. Bruce Moeller and he actually started as a police officer in Naperville but he ended up as a fire chief of a large county system down in Florida, then fire chief of a city, not too similar size as Sheboygan eventually turned into, he served for about five, six years as city manager then moved on to assistant county manager of Republic safety. So as you can see, our team has not only the operational street background and experience, but we also bring the rest of the equation with our team to help communities and our clients make sure that they land where they need to land, taking in all the competing interests between the political environment, economic environment, fiscal constraints, et cetera to make sure that we can have implementable solutions which is something that we pride ourselves on. It would be easy to write a world class fire department report, hand it off, say this is what you should do but it's not implementable, it lands on the shelf and collects dust and we don't want that. So we work very hard with our clients to make sure that we find the right balance between the community's willingness to assume risk and the either desire or capability to fund protective services. So somewhere in that balance is the policy decision of how and where to set your service levels. So another member on our team would be chief B.J. Jungman. He's actually a chief of a community, Burnsville, Minnesota, and he'll come over and assist us with that as well. Our data analysts, Dr. Gong Long and Dr. Teresa Johnson will both be working on our quantitative analytics and our financial piece comes from Diane Wright and she retired out of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue as their budget director. Then all of our GIS is done by a gentleman named Brian McGrath and all of our consultants work for us exclusively so we don't have any subcontractors or anything else. That's kind of the overall platform. I'm sorry, our technology tripped us up a little bit but I'll be happy to answer questions or however format you want. Any questions from Alderman Bellinger? Thank you, Chairman. Steve, I talked to you a couple of weeks ago after I got the recommendation from the people, city administrator and the people that picked your firm as one of the firm that we would like to go with. Should we move ahead with this? My question to you at that time was there's a phase one and there's a phase two. Can you both be implemented consecutively or does it have to be one after the other or can it be done consecutively? Can we meet the six-month timeframe or originally you have a 12-month timeframe on there? If we were to do it one at a time. Sure. In the proposal, the way we read it, as our discussion, we thought it was a consecutive request on the city standpoint but looking at the topics, it would more naturally flow as a single project and yes, the phase two would have been four months and the phase one would have been six months so we can integrate the two and complete it in the six-month timeframe. So concurrently, that was what I was searching for. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I just have a couple other real quick questions. First off, I think fire protection, police protection is very important to us. I've always said that the police protect us from others and the fire department protects us from ourselves. Having said that, it sounds like your company has a huge wealth of knowledge, some very knowledgeable people with doctorates and so on. The question that I have, having said that, is with the other information that we've received, it really goes against the, I'm not going to say the acronym correctly, but the NR, there's the regulations that you guys have through the fire department. Okay. So are you guys going to be using the same platform as far as the rules and regulations to follow with recommendations? Then how would that play into the wealth of knowledge that you have with everybody else that's in your team compared to everybody, you know, with the information that we've received already? If we're going against the same rules and regulations, how does your team play into that? Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good question. So there's actually several layers to that, so I'll attempt to address it. If I understood correctly, you're probably referring to NFPA? Yes, please. Okay, so just make sure I'm on track. So as far as the NFPA recommendations, they're consensus standards. So in every report, we do a gap analysis between what I'd say your status quo, whatever your current level of performance is, and then do a gap analysis too. If you fully implemented 1710, which is the other operational recommendation, then we can both provide what it would take to meet that, which many times meets more stations or more resources from the status quo. I don't know where you're at today, but that's generally how it goes. So we'll map that out, we'll cost it out, and give you the pros and cons of how to get there. And then when it comes to our wealth of knowledge, that's where the rest of the story comes in. If 1710 is the desired service level, then we'll design a system to meet 1710 at the desired service level. If there are any competing demands or constraints where it's not either desired or that may be a long-term plan, but you can't implement it immediately, then we'll march out where do we go from merging from your status quo and have a continuous improvement plan. So that's really the avenue that we go, and we take all the competing components and push that forward in order to make sure that we address that appropriately. Thank you. Alderman Bourne. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The chief was kind enough to give me a copy of your proposal that you gave to the city, and I've had a chance to review it the last couple days. And in phase two, the couple things I wanted to just, a couple questions I wanted to ask to you. On the review of the financial viability, the ambulance services, I would imagine you're going to be taking a look at the way we do the accounting in the ambulance service right now and either tell us that we're doing it the way you recommend us to do it, or there's other ways we can do our accounting that would maybe better give us an idea of what the total costs are of the ambulance service. Is that correct? Yes, sir. So we start with what your actual costs are to provide the service. That's where we start. And I don't pretend to understand your system yet. So we'll first have to dissect, if they're cross-trained, how to partition out the real costs between the fire program, the EMS program, et cetera. But once we settle that, and we'll work with the department and the city budget folks to get to that, then we'll actually look at the service level, the workload, how the calls are distributed. So it all starts from the community's demand for services. And then we'll back all the way up to the back office and look at your billing rate structure, how that competes, what your payer mix is in the community, and really look at the rest of it all the way back to the actual accounting process. Good. The other thing is the organizational analysis, staffing, management functions, and effectiveness. Do you generally do a time study of the management people in the department? Again, take a look at what their day consists of. Should they be doing more of this, less of this? And as part of that, do you look over the possible consolidation of duties? For example, can captains do more, and the battalion chiefs can do less, and spend their time in more productive areas? Is that the type of thing that you do? Yes, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a time allocation study. We're only here for a small snapshot that would be extremely easy to bias that equation just for a small. The way we overcome that is we do structured interviews, and then we look at the balance of the duties and the job descriptions, and then we walk through that. Generally, we found that the fire department administrations are more than happy to share their challenges with you, and then we'll sort through that from our experience to try to make sure that we find the right mix by both function and operation. Many times we find, much like the 80-20 rule, that there's a lot of effort spent outside of job descriptions in order to make it all come together. So we make sure that we account for all those different elements. And when you're talking about evaluation of training and qualifications, are you looking kind of at the position of a chief or battalion chief or captain, and do you compare our requirements both with experience and education to other departments you worked with, and are we doing good in that area, or are we deficient in that area compared to other departments? Do you do that kind of an analysis? Our analysis really starts with the effectiveness. You know, obviously I'm for academic attainment, but if there isn't a deficiency in the impact of the outcome of the department, then yes, we can make some broad recommendations, but really we start at the effectiveness and the outcomes and how efficient the organization is and how it's working. That's our first platform, because in our experience, personality always, and individual capability always supersedes the degrees. So we make sure that we account for all that. As far as community comparisons, we'll give you some broad frameworks from our experience going around the country of what's there. But at the end of that, the reality is when it comes to the administrative capacity and the organization, there's many ways to structure the organization and be effective. So part of our process is to really evaluate what are the individual capacities, and those individuals can shape your organizational design based on their capabilities, where in one organization, they work very well here, but in another organization, you may need more help in one division than another because of the individuals and the physicians. Thanks. Any other questions? I've got one. Do you look at the total impact of our department versus our surrounding area? John Wilson, the township wagon, and how they interact with one another is where we know what our total impact is for our surrounding area and that they would understand what a great job we're doing. Is that coming to your study? Here's the answer. If you'd like us to do a comparison with like communities in the area, we can put together a small assessment for that, and we can work with the city and the department to determine which variables you wanted to compare on. We don't encourage communities to do that because the expectations for service can change from community to community. So if one community has a different level of capability or commitment to public safety, then their per capita costs and all the other items will trickle down. So you just have to hate to say it, but you have to take it with a grain of salt, but it is valuable for the political process. So we're more than happy to do that, but that's not an integral part of our process because we want to tailor it specifically to your unique community. Yes, sir. Yeah, just to follow up on what you were asking, Alderman Heidemann, do you do... I may have read it in here somewhere, but do you do a kind of a study of what we're doing now with our mutual aid with our other smaller departments, not our full-time departments? What we're doing now, where there may be some opportunities, that type of thing? Yes, sir. That was actually in phase two that was identified. So our approach is there's really, we'll call it three tiers. Anytime you're going to look at a shared service, you really have to make sure that there's a similar risk value, there's a similar funding value, and you have to have some kind of commonality and governance. So those are the three main components we look at. So what we plan to do for you in your first study is really to just answer the operational piece. Let's start there and say, is there an operational advantage to enhance shared services? And if the answer is yes, then we'll talk to you about how you want to address that moving forward. If the answer is no, then you may not want to continue to consider that. But that's the first main piece because 90% of your costs, as you know, are in labor. So let's answer the operational component first, and then we can discuss some other options. Thank you, Chair. Couple more questions. The studies that you've done for many, many groups and communities, how many of them have actually come to you not knowing what they were going to do with the information? Just had a study to kind of collect data. I mean, do they typically have an idea, like you said before, gap analysis and definition of where they want to go as far as more safety, less safety, more competitive? Can you kind of elaborate on that a little bit? You think of how best to address that. Let's just say that there is considerable variability in each community's understanding and technical expertise. So some communities may feel very, very strongly that they have all their eyes dotted and their t's crossed, and then we come in and we assist, and then some light bulbs go off, and maybe some different lenses occur where they can look at how they operate. I don't know that to be true one way or the other in your agency, but certainly we haven't had any clients that weren't very pleased with the work product and we didn't add value before we left. So I think to have that level of discourse, even if it validates some internal assumptions is still very valuable. Thank you. Any other questions? Because I had some other things beeping here, and I thought, what, Alderman Belinger? There's no more question. I'm not sure if there's going to be any additional, but I just wanted to personally thank you for making the time during the holiday season to make it to our beautiful city. Hopefully you had some time today to drive around a little bit and see what kind of a community we are. It is much nicer in the summer than it is right now, which is the snow banks. So thank you, save travels, and have a merry Christmas, and I appreciate your presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And before us then, it's discussion of possible recommendations of the Common Council. What I'd like to do is, again, I would like to take a vote as to whether or not we're going to bring this item 3-1 back to the... I'm sorry, Chief. Can I speak? Sure. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to go on record that I'm in opposition to this for two reasons. Number one, I already have a plan. I came up with a plan. I was asked to come up with a plan. I came up with a plan. It's a three-year plan, but it's very aggressive, and it accomplishes quite a few things in that three-year time span. And after that, on January 1st of 2020, we'll be set up for the future for this department with increase in population, with increase in building construction, and our staffing level safety, and all of those things that will be addressed. Number two, and I didn't even think of this until about a week or two ago, but the plan starts with the 17 budget. And that budget's in. The capital's been approved. My operational budget's been approved. And it includes one person. And it's just human nature that if this is going on, and I don't know when it's going to start, and I don't know how long it's going to take, six months, eight months, ten months. We've been told six months, and that's great. But we don't have time to wait. We need to act now. And I need to move forward with the things that we need to do. And that starts with hiring that battalion chief next, you know, in July 1st of next year. So the actual tendency would be, if we got this study going on, why should we even do that? And we don't have time to wait. And that three-year program that I have, that I believe will guarantee success, starts next year. So those are the reasons that I'm opposed to it. That's all I wanted to say, unless there's any questions for me. Alderman Ballinger. I don't have any questions, but I'd like to speak. Please. Thank you, Chairman. I originally brought this study about six years ago. I had a similar proposal. I met with Chief Herman at the time. I made him aware of what my intentions were. He was not in favor of it. The council at the time was not in favor of it, and it didn't go anywhere. I brought it up again, and I met with the chief, and I met with Chase and Cal. And I've had several subsequent conversations with them since this progressed. The chief originally was in favor of it. He told me, you know, anything I can do to get more information, why wouldn't I want more information? I think we're doing a great job. It's just going to verify that. I want more information. Go ahead and do it. I'm in favor of it. At the public protection and safety meeting a couple weeks ago, I asked him again if he still supported it, and he was very wishy-washy. He said six of one, half a dozen of the other. I don't really care. You know, I could go either way. Subsequently, last Friday, I believe I got a voicemail from the chief saying, I'm dead set against it because I had a conversation with Chairman Heidemann, and he said that it's going to take 12 months to do the study. I'm not in favor of that. I want to get my three men back. I want to get the roofs repaired, and I want my fire truck. That's not going to happen if the study starts. I replied to him via e-mail and I copied Alderman Heidemann on it. I said Alderman Heidemann does not have the unilateral authority to stop the budget process and stop the funding of those things. The budget was already approved. You're getting all that, and nothing has changed in your assertion that the study was going to take 12 months was incorrect also. At the public protection and safety meeting, I stated that I had talked to Steve, and I asked him if we could run it concurrently, phase one and phase two, and get it done in six months. He affirmed that, and he affirmed that again tonight. So that was incorrect too. So, you know, what I think is that as it's coming closer to a vote, you're thinking that this, you know, it may have some success. It may pass. It may not. I don't know. We'll find it out. But now you have some opposition against it. And I greatly resent that. I've been straightforward with you, with the union, with everybody else. I've got no bias. I've got no horse in the game on this whole issue, and it just, it really, really bothers me. There's also been some insinuation from some other people that I have a relationship or professional or personal or financial with this organization. And I can assure you 100%, I do not. I've contacted each one of the six individual organizations that submitted a proposal prior to me doing the study to get background information on what their capabilities were and finding out what would be a good fit, a scope of work that would be needed in that type of thing. And I subsequently made a phone call to Steve. I've spoken to him twice in my whole life. Never knew of him before. Never knew of his company before. And so, you know, I take offense at that, that I've got something personally to gain from this whole thing. I don't. What I want is for the best fire protection for the city at the most economical cost. I want a long-term plan, and it's taken you 20 months to come up with something. We've been asking and asking and asking. So that's why I brought this forward. So, you know, and also a lot of what the council votes on is very mundane issues. This past week, we've got something referred that we'll be voting on in a couple weeks. It's going to be on May 13th, the International Migratory Bird Day. How's that going to affect the residents? It's not going to have a great deal of effect on the residents. We do occasionally vote on things that are extremely important, the budget, capital borrowing, any type of fees, garbage fee, City Hall, things like that. I would rank this as one of those important votes that's going to impact the residents of the city. We do studies all the time, and we've got, we did an A Street, a study for the A Street plan, and you can argue that the, we've got a director of planning. We've got a city administrator. We pay them a lot of money. They should be the experts. Why do we need to have a plan for that? We're going to do a plan parking study. We've got a director for transit, and we've got a city engineer. Why do we need to do a parking study? You know, that's in the plan. Last week, at the council meeting, we just approved a professional engineering services agreement for the high strength waste receiving in co-digested evaluation for the water treatment plant. You know, why are we doing that? We've got Sharon, who's in charge of the water treatment plant, and David Bebel. You know, why are we doing that? Why are we spending $27,000 on that? In all of those instances, nobody questioned the cost of what those studies were going to be. And what I would argue is that the individuals, the head of the departments, aren't necessarily the industry experts and can provide us the detail and the depth that we need to run the city in the most efficient manner possible. So that's why we need to have this study. And also, the study is about $59,000. I did a quick calculation. $59,000, well, on the face of that, that's a lot of money. And I'm not cavalier about that. That is a lot of money. And I do certainly respect the taxpayers' dollars and am very responsible with how we spend it. But that is less than 1% of your $8 million budget. It's less than 3 quarters of a percent. It's about .73% of the budget. So in the big scheme of things, the wealth of information and the knowledge that we're going to get, the depth, the broadness of the plan, in the long-term focus of it, I think is going to be invaluable for the city moving forward. And I think it's vital that we move forward and we vote in a positive manner to fund this study. Thank you. Alderman Donahue. Thank you, Chair. I would move that the city enters into a contract for professional services with Fitch and Associates to do the operations and developmental structure study that is outlined in the materials. Second. Okay. Could I speak to that? Yes, please. Thank you. So I've given this a lot of thought as well. I think that we have some financially very large decisions to make here. If for no other reason, if we maintain five fire stations, we're going to have to put over $2 million into the repair of those stations to make sure that they continue to be functioning. And we may choose to do that. I mean, that may be a good idea and a way of moving forward. On the other hand, there may be a different way of looking at it. And what we have before us now is a very good study by the Firefighters Union. And I do appreciate that. And I particularly like the maps. You know, I like the color maps. And I learned a lot from all of that. It puts full faith and necessity on maintenance of the standards of the National, the NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association, whatever it is. That's it. You know, 1710, you know, which gives us the number of firefighters that we need to have on each vehicle answering calls and so forth. One of my questions is, is that the best? Is that the only? Is that the required? Is that the volitional standard? Or is that something that we can consider in the mix? One of the things if we have four fire stations, we meet the 1710 standards. And maybe we want to do that rather than invest $2 million in repairing a very old building and then another building that's not quite so old. Just given the amount of money that is involved just in the repairs alone, I think the study has justified. I also think it's going to give us deeper and more meaningful information that helps guide us. And the gentleman kept speaking about, which was just interesting to me and I haven't thought about it, which is what is the community standard? Are we in a position where we want to guarantee safety? Are we in a position where we want to be in the best position to respond quickly, but we can't guarantee things? What, you know, what is our philosophy? And I think through, it sounded like some qualitative, structured interviews and so forth, we might get that information and I think that is going to be an important piece of the decision as well. I appreciate the chief's plan. As far as I can tell, it pretty much tracks the union's plan, except it has a huge budget-busting proposal for 2018. It takes us out of expenditure restraints. If we fund the chief's proposal for, so we will have six additional firefighters and two battalion chiefs, something else has got to give. Are we going to lose, I mean, how many police officers do we want to lose? Or do we want to shut down a couple of our parks? What do we want to do in order to meet this really significant budget increase? That may be the chief's plan for moving forward, but I don't think it's necessarily going to be this council's plan because we can't afford it. And we just can't. If we violate expenditure restraints, we'll lose 700 grand from the state, and then I think we're in a world of hurt. So $59,000 is a lot of dough. I'm not disputing that. I'm just saying that, you know, it's the old expression, penny-wise and pound-foolish. We shouldn't do that. I was impressed with the gentleman's presentation. It was measured. It was pretty smart, as far as I can tell. And it may meet pretty much what the chief and the firefighters want to do. Then we can all feel, hey, that's okay. That's good. We've made a good decision here. It's like deciding to have brain surgery and going to your wonderfully talented general practitioner. And he says, I think this is what we ought to do. Most of us would want, if we were going to have brain surgery, someone who was really smart about brains to look at what it was that we were looking at, what we needed to do and get that kind of specialist. So this is specialist help in my view. It is a little more expensive, but ultimately, oh boy, I really think we're going to save a whole lot more than $59,000, have a better fire department, and we can all rest easier. Thank you. Alderman Thiel. Thank you. I'm not in favor of spending the money for these studies. In fact, John brought up a lot of other studies that we've talked about, that we need these, all these other studies. And I really thought about this a lot. I think we do need to put more emphasis on our, on our department heads for some of these studies. Some of the studies that I seem to come across for like these parking studies in here, I could have went home and drew a map and showed you, hey, we need to put a spot here, spot here, spot here. I think we're releasing a lot of money on a lot of these studies that we do, and I'm definitely going to start taking a closer look at it. We had the union do a nice study for us, and I thought they did a very nice job. The chief sat down and put in, and did a nice job. I think we got to go off of these recommendations. They're working together for, I think, for the first time in a while. They're sitting down, they're talking. We're doing teamwork. I think that's something that we wanted. We wanted everybody to work together. And that's what I really like seeing what's happening here. And I commend both of you guys for everybody doing that. We talked about dollars. They could come back with a study, have the same thing we got, and we're still in that same constraint that we can't do it. So what's the difference if he comes through and says, hey, we need to do this, compared to the chief's proposal? We still don't have the financial to do it. I just think wasting another $60,000 on taxpayer money just doesn't make sense to me. And not just with this study, but with studies going forward. I think we need to take a lot closer look that I think we're wasting a lot of dollars on doing a lot of this. Thank you. I just want to say that I'm also against this study right now. And since we have the Fire Department and the Firefighters Union talking and meeting, I would like to see them come up with a long-range plan, say what, in the next three months. And if they can't come up with a plan that we can agree on, then we can still go forward and hire for this study and still have it done in time for the next year's budget. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I walked into this with a fair amount of skepticism. I listened to the presentation. I didn't hear a great deal beyond the information we already have between what city staff has provided, what the unions provided. I heard a fair amount of resume. Rattling up here's what we're going to do. What I didn't hear was, I heard we'll get comparables with cities around the country, but not necessarily within the state. And the state is the laws that we work by in terms of the interviews. While we're getting the feedback from the staff and the union membership who seem to agree on what our next step should be, I didn't see a great deal of, okay, there could be a long-term plan that comes out of this study. Oh, great. What is that? A 10-year plan, a 20-year plan? Plans are just that. No plan that lasts more than two years. The variables all change. So I have a little issue with, yeah, we'll have them look at this, and here's where I want you to be in 2025. And my gut instinct is none of that will be valid at that time. So I don't want to put too much stock into the, oh, here's what we're going to do so far down the road, because we've already proven that we can deviate off those courses. Is that Alderman Thiel said, with any number of studies? The recommendations are a suggestion. We may never get there because of the budget constraints and the changing demographics and changing neighborhoods. I'm still mighty skeptical about spending the money on this particular endeavor. Thank you, Chair. Alderman Wolff. Thank you, Chair. I guess I just want to point out a few additional things. I think we've all understand what some of the issues and opportunities are that we're facing. And I think I believe in studies. I believe in additional information, but first and foremost, the hardest part that I see that the city has is defining what are we going to do with the information that we have. We have already a great report from the union using the NFPA, if I said it correctly. Yes. Also, we have the 2020. We already know that we're putting certain, we're filling certain resources and spending some money going into the 2017 year. That's already been basically put aside for that. The concern that I have is spending the money, having a report, finding out what the, I'm intrigued to find out what the gap analysis is. But again, we only have so many dollars to spend. And the concern that I have is we spend a ton of money, I say a ton of money, $60,000 is a lot of money in my world. And we find out that we're doing okay with how much money we're spending with the amount of population that we have. We're not looking at reducing stations, we're not looking at adding stations, we're not looking at how we're crewing per se. We may come up with a gap analysis to say, you guys are doing really well with what you've got, which I think our fire department's doing a great job. I'm just very concerned about spending the money and not having a defined plan of what we're going to do with the information that we get. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? We've had a motion. Mr. Chair, can I address a couple of things at Alderman? You made your point about what was on the agenda. There's some misinformation here, I'd like to clarify it. Alderman Bellinger, I'm sorry, Chief. Thank you, Chairman. I would just like to say, I don't know what people are afraid of coming with a study. And I demonstrated earlier that we pay for studies all the time. Our department heads and our leadership aren't necessarily industry experts on every latest and greatest thing that's out there. And that's why we fund studies. And information is vital. What are we going to do with the information? I hope we're going to take it constructively and we're going to follow whatever it is and try to implement it the best we can with the financial constraints that we're under. So I don't know what the study is going to say. I don't know if it's going to say we need to spend a lot more. We need to spend less. We need more stations. We need less stations. We need to relocate them. We need different management structure. We need to get out of the ambulance service. We need to beef up our accounting with the ambulance. I don't know what it's going to say. But I'm going to take the information because these are experts in their field. And I'm certainly going to make sure that, and do my part as an alderman and an elected official, that we take the information and we have a roadmap and a plan to follow it to implement things that are suggested and that we achieve the greatest fire protection in the city that we can in the most economical manner that we can given the constraints that we're under. So I don't know what everybody's afraid of all this information for. Information is, we all want as much information as we can. This is an $8 million department annually that we're funding and everybody's just thinking, well, you know what? We've waited 20 months for this 2020 study or this 2020 plan to come out. You know what? It's gospel. It's good. Let's just go with it. You know, even though that Alderman Donahue stated that it's a budget buster in 2018 and there would be significant ramifications that we'd have to look at, you know, moving forward whether it's, you know, getting rid of police or admin here in the City Hall or your public works or outsourcing different things, whatever it's going to be. You know, let's get the information. Let's see what it is and then we can move forward. You can't very well have a plan on what you're going to do with the information until you see what it is. You don't know what it is, so how can you plan for it? So all I'm asking for is spending three quarters of a percent of the fire budget to come up with a long-term plan and look forward and see what we can come up with and move forward. Thank you. Okay, there's been an Alderman born. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. I'm going to support the study because I think it's drastically needed and just going over this stuff that I reviewed here in this phase two, first of all, the review of the financial viability of the ambulance services. We've been in this for eight years. We certainly haven't had an internal financial viability of the ambulance services. The next one is the evaluation of training and qualifications of the department. The next big one that's huge, absolutely huge for me, is an organizational analysis, staffing, management functions, and effectiveness. That, I think, can really be done by a third party. And apparently this firm and the five or six other firms that send us by proposals are doing these analysis for city governments all over the country. The next one is strategies for cost containment and additional funding. I didn't see really anything in the union's proposal or the chief's proposal about any cost containment or better ways of doing things, any innovation. The last one here is enhanced collaboration of shared services and contracted services. No mention of that. And as Alderman Donahue said, this is a budget buster for 2018. We're going to need, hopefully, we're going to have to have some enhanced collaboration and we need some cost containment strategies. And we're not getting this in-house. And I think by going to an outside organization that's going to look at this unbiased, no politics involved, I think we're going to get some answers to these very important questions and that's why I'm supporting the study. Ormithiel. A couple things. One of my main concerns here is we have two fire stations running with two people if I'm correct. Correct? Yes. And let me paint a picture here. Let's say one of these apartment buildings on the south side, I think it's called Amanda Lane. I think they're in the city, correct? Let's say they have a little kitchen fire over there. You guys cannot go in there until a third person arrives. Correct? Is that? Tell the next arriving unit. So we're looking at times there. Just picture that. Six to eight minutes. Correct. And you're like right there. Yeah, you're pretty close. You're right down the road. This could be a small kitchen fire and in a matter of minutes, because we're waiting another three minutes, because you're at least three minutes away from there. Another three minutes away, that kitchen fire could end up being a whole apartment complex going down. That is my concern here. We need to get bodies in here. Studies or whatever. I'm concerned about the south side and the far north side of Sheboygan for their safety. We have a whole industrial park out there. We have two people manning that south side. I know some of you live on the far south side. You have a small fire in your house. I don't know, I'm concerned about that also. I'm concerned about the safety of just having two people in the north and south side in the city of Sheboygan. And any study is going to tell you that, whether it's this study, the union study, any study, the chief study, I really have that concern. I'd rather see that 60,000 dollars go to a personnel and put safety right away than to wait for a study. Also if I could, I would like to hear what the chief wanted to correct if I could open the floor to him. Thank you. Alderman Warren first. Alderman Thiele, I couldn't agree with you more on response times. Response times is a minuscule part of this study. The things that I just went over are very, very important besides response times. And I totally agree with you. We have to get as many people on scene as we can. One of the ways we could do that is to get the battalion chiefs out of the stations and go to more calls. There was a study done by that. There was a study done on that last year by somebody who just retired and that was one of the big things. That was one of the things that Chase mentioned in his report. We got to have three people there. Okay, then get the battalion chief off of his duff at the station ordering paper towels for the station and get out on the calls. So they've got three people there and the second unit gets there, they've got five. That's your problem solved right there. The battalion chiefs got to get out of the stations and go on calls more regularly than they are. Thank you. One of the things that I want to address for all of them in the field, the budget was passed. There's three fighter fighters that are going to be coming on under the department. So then those numbers are going to change as far as the way those are staffed both at the south side station will have three or the... Just the north side. But staffing has been improved by this last budget and we've got three firefighters that quite honestly could have been brought in in 2015 and weren't brought in. But again, we did address an issue as far as manning some of the stations. So we've got to let that come in first through this last budget. Hold on a second. Chief, I'm going to give you an opportunity. Alderman, you're operating under a misconception and I think that's... I've been hearing this rumor for a while now. The first person that ever asked me to come up with my plan was City Administrator Hoffland. He's the first one to ask me to come up with my plan. In the past, I was told you will cut four people and you will go from five to four fire stations and I want you to justify that. That's what happened in the past. He's the first one to ask me what my opinion was. And I didn't just fall off the turnip truck. I have an associate degree, three bachelors, a masters. I was one of four people in the world selected for the Harvard Fellowship. I have my EFO. I've been in the fire service for 34 years. I know what I'm doing. I know what I'm doing and I know what this city needs and what you said is exactly what we want. It's no different. I want the best department we can provide with the best services, highest level, best training and economical or to be cost efficient. We both want the same thing. So I just wanted to make that clear. And when we spoke the first time, my plan wasn't finished yet when we met. That's it. Thank you. I'm going to say never mind that. We've got a motion and a second in front of us. Call the question. Call the question, yes. We lost all the person. We don't have a quorum. No, we still didn't. We picked up one. Yeah, we did. That's what you came in after. Loondowski rolled out. Loondowski rolled out. He left. Okay, there's been a motion. Please, Mary, take roll. Ballinger. Aye. Bitter's. Nay. Born. Aye. Honehill. Aye. Heidemann. Aye. Herman. Aye. Rob. Aye. Thank you very much. Nothing else is on the agenda. Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Merry Christmas.