 I asked for geographic informational system report, discussion of the relevant findings and then exploration of various alternatives, and ultimately concluding with our recommendations. The approach that we use is the same, irrespective of the client, but of course how that plays out and how it interacts is different. Fitch utilizes a very data-driven approach. So we pay heavy attention to the data. And in the full document, you have a copy of the full data report, which is really descriptive statistics. It talks about how the system is performing today. And we put that in some context as we did, especially in the executive summary. Once we have that, then we use computer software to do the modeling of if the system were to change somehow, if you were to add a station or move a station, delete a unit, add a unit, what would happen? And that software that we use, the geographic information software, we calibrate that against the actual historical performance. So the two larger attachments or sections of the report that you have, the data report, which really is a description of how the system performs today based on the data that we extracted directly from the computer-aided dispatch system in the 9-1-1 Center. It takes that and then we model the performance. Besides the CAD data, we also looked at other data sources, including the FIRE reports that are filed by members of the department after every event they go on and other data sources that we use. And then there's a qualitative component where we actually met with city administration members of the department, the command staff members of the rank and file, including the union. I had discussions with them about their perceptions. And we somewhat validate or look for issues that are raised by those people that are day in, day out providing services in the community. So that's the manner in which it helps us focus because as anybody who's read a lot of data reports, as I'm sure this council has, you can look at it over and over again. Sometimes you're not seeing the force through the trees to take claim of that. So let's talk about the overall performance of the system and describe that to you. So we'll go to the first slide in that. And again, this may be a little difficult to see on the screen, but I know the council has the full report as well as a PDF of the PowerPoint. The current performance, what we reflect here is the calls that occurred. We took several years of data and we do that to look for trends. There are calls increasing or decreasing, but we primarily focus on 2017, the most recent year for which we had the computer to dispatch data. It was 2017 data. In total, the agency ran just over 5,100 calls. 76% of those calls are EMS related. So the medical activity in the community, I will tell you that's fairly typical across the nation that we find. Fire departments that are providing some level of EMS service to their community, that is the larger demand. There's been quite a few shifts in demands on fire services over the last three decades. Your department reflects that as well where the majority of the activity is related to that. Obviously, so out of the 5,100 calls and in the report, you notice we use the term calls or incidents. So this is a single event where somebody calls and has an emergency. Later on, I'll talk about the number of responses. How many units does it take to actually handle that event? One of the other important things to know as we look on the next slide is what we refer to as a temporal distribution. It's interesting, but obviously you do not have the same number of calls at 4 o'clock in the morning as you do at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. This particular graphic that you have up there shows those calls with the red section of the bar reflecting the fire activity, the blue reflecting the EMS activity, broken down hour by hour, starting at midnight on the far left and going through to 11 p.m. on the far right. This pattern, interestingly, you'll see almost in every single community in the United States of America, except for probably one, and that would be Las Vegas. Pretty much every other community, though, they seem to have a slightly bizarre pattern out there for some reason, but almost everywhere else has this exact same pattern. And so it's important because obviously, since the calls are not evenly distributed, we have to look at those daytime hours, right, generally between 8, 9, 10 in the morning through afternoon, evening hours, that there are sufficient resources for the agency for the department to be able to respond to it. One of the other things that we have on the next one are the maps. I consolidated them on one slide here, and there are a number of these in the report, but on the left and on the right, respectively, are where the fire calls are occurring and on the right where the medical calls are occurring. Interestingly, what you'll notice, we call these a heat map. So the red spots, the red dots, show you where the majority of the activity is. When looking at this, I know you won't be able to see it on the screen here, but for those of you that have the document in front of you, if you look into the lower right-hand corner, you'll see the legend for these. The red reflects that what it does is it takes the call volume and divides it into quintiles, so five evenly constructed components. So for the medical calls on the right side, to get that number you need, you see there are a little over 200 calls to occur in that geographic area to turn it red, for the fire activity you'll need about 60. Interestingly, again, in most communities, is you'll see that the pattern of where the call activity is is actually oftentimes similar between EMS and fire. One of the things that we will sometimes see in communities, we don't see it as much here, but you'll see it stand out when you have, for example, a nursing facility where the fire department may end up on a significant number of calls. Because in designing the systems I'll come to in a moment, we look at doing so to cover 90% of the risk. So of course, just from a design, system design, you want to place your resources where the demand in the community is. So as we reflect that we have a certain number of calls, they happen different times of the day, greater demand during the day time than nighttime, and they are not evenly distributed throughout the community. There are some areas that drive and demand more services than others. Let's look at it a little more detailed if we can on the next slide with the performance looking at individual units. One thing I want to point out, this slide's a little busy, but this shows each of the stations with the units that are assigned to those stations. And if you go about to the center, if you look at the column headings, you're going to see one that says annual total responses. And what I want to point out for just a moment for the council is that at the very bottom, the total responses was over 10,000. If you remember earlier, I said there were 5,000 events, but 10,000 responses. On average, overall, you send approximately two vehicles to every event. One of the things that we look at is how many vehicles do you spend? Do you have enough vehicles to do so? How do you deploy them? Is it optimized? So this shows you the relative workload of each of the units. And we calculate the time that it's tied up on a call, the annual busy hours, by knowing from the time that the unit is dispatched to a call, until the moment the vehicle is available to be dispatched again, or it becomes available from the incidents it's on. And it's now available to go again. Those busy hours only capture the emergency activity. One of the things that's important for the council and understand, particularly with the next slide I'll show you, is that there are many other things the members of the department have to do. This only reflects how much time they're actually out either handling a medical emergency or handling a fire activity. This does not include the time to prepare their equipment. It doesn't include the paperwork on the back end. It doesn't include restocking the equipment. It doesn't include a variety of other tasks. But when we look at that, we look at that to see if you have enough resources, or if you have resources that are so overused that you either have to make an adjustment on how calls are dispatched, or you need to add more resources. The next slide will show us kind of the summary of that. And this is a calculation that we refer to as unit hour utilization. Again, only looking at the time that the vehicle is tied up on emergency activity, we calculate that. We see within the city that all of your units are is single digits. Anywhere from the ladder truck at 2%. The busiest unit is medic one, the ambulance, which is 7% of the time tied up on calls. Here's an interesting thing. I need to point out, some people would look at this. A business person may look at this and say, well, wow, they don't seem to be doing much. You don't want them doing too much. If you note the red line on the chart there, that line is at the 30% mark on the left. It's at the 30% or 0.30. That is a recommendation that came from the International Association of Firefighters, the National Union, with the maximum amount of time you would want a unit tied up. As I indicated, there's a variety of other things that have to happen, training, restocking the vehicle, doing the paperwork, et cetera, et cetera. Quality assurance, ensuring the crews are rested and trained and equipped properly to do it. But in addition to that, think about this. Some people may mistakenly, and certainly for members of the public that may be seeing this, I understand, from the chair, seeing this online, is people say, well, we want them busy all the time. Well, no, you don't. If they're tied up, as an example, 50% of the time, that means there's a one and two chance, a coin flip, whether that vehicle is available to respond to my emergency, right, if it's tied up handling somebody else. So there is a limit. We try to balance the amount of time that the vehicles are tied up and ensure that you have the resources available. Here's what this slide tells us. We generally recommend when you get to 0.25, between 0.25 and 3.0, you're getting close. You need to start making some adjustments. In your system, the good news is you have capacity in the system. There is a certain amount of growth that's occurring in your system now. I can tell you, you can anticipate that to happen, to grow greater in the future, particularly with regard to medical activity, which is what's been happening nationally, also happening in your system. And as it does, the good news is there's no indication at this point that you're going to need to add more resources. You don't have to put another unit out there, equip another ambulance, do anything of that nature, at least on a workload basis. But let's continue on and look at the performance in the way of response time, if we could, on the next slide. Oftentimes, for the public, we sit there and talk about response time, how quickly, if it's an emergency, how quickly will they get there? These two tables derived from the data report reflect that. For members of the council and the way that we design and evaluate systems, we generally talk about it in what we call the 90th percentile. The lower table, and you saw throughout the report, we would report data on average, which is the way it's generally talked about certainly in the public, and at the 90th percentile. The 90th, yes, sir? Could you please use your mic? Use your level unit information. Going back to the page where you had the graph with the blue bars. Yes, on the slide before. What's the red line on the top for, and what does that mean in relationship to the blue bars? Yeah, so in the work that we do, Fitch often recommends that you do not exceed, again, the 30%, but the red line is actually derived from the International Association of Firefighters, the IAFF, and their recommendation in the first edition of the guidebook for fire-based EMS, if I remember was the title correctly, and they recommend that you do not have a unit run more than .30%, that's an upper limit. We concur with that. We actually say at .25, so 25% of the time, you need to start making some adjustments. When you run a unit over that, there are a number of adverse impacts. One, the availability of that vehicle to be ready for the next call is diminished. Two, the readiness of the crew, because again, they're constantly just going from one call to another. So the red line is kind of an upper limit, and we show it there to reflect that at least in your system, you have what we call capacity in the system. You could add more medical calls, and you would likely not have to add any more units. Certainly. Can we go back to the other slide now? So we look at response time, when we look at response time, we look at that in the context of various components. We look at how long it takes the 911 center to process the call, from when the call rings in their center until they dispatch the fire units, that's called dispatch time. Then we have where the crews are dispatched. The tones go off in the station until they're actually in the vehicle and moving towards the emergency. That's the dispatch time. Travel time is pretty self-explanatory from the time the wheels begin moving out of the fire station until they're at arrival at the scene, and then we put those times together for the overall response time. In your system on average, 2.1 minutes for dispatch, 1.4 for turnout, 2.8 for travel on. But as I was starting to explain, one thing that we do in designing systems is if you think of an average, do you all remember kind of the normal distribution curve we all learned a long time ago? If you think of that, if we design the system on average, here's the problem. It's like a coin toss again. Maybe I'll get there, maybe I won't. If I have a loved one that's suffering a medical emergency, a heart attack, a stroke, and we ask the council to sit there and set standards for how rapid the fire department should get there. You don't want to do it where it's a coin toss that maybe you'll meet it, maybe you won't. In the industry, we design and evaluate systems with a high degree of confidence. And what's been accepted is 90, the 90th percentile, or 90 times out of 100. So that if you set the standard that you will meet this response time requirement, and this is what you tell the chief in the fire department you want done, you can say with confidence that 90 times out of 100, they're gonna meet that, right? And that's how you design and evaluate systems. Now, that's a difficult concept as a former fire chief and also as a former city manager. In the public, generally don't talk at the 90th percentile because it's a difficult concept and the public gets challenged with it, but as policy makers, and the way the fire department looks at it, you do want them to evaluate on the 90th percentile and offer that. So when we go to the bottom table, it's those same domestics, but we look at it, what did you do 90 times out of 100? So the dispatch time 3.4, turnout 2.2, travel time was 4.7. I will tell you, that's actually a very, very good number. That's a very good number. Reflective of the geography that you have, the road network, the number of units that you've got and where they're placed. So you've got a very good time there. The overall time is nine minutes. So that's how we evaluated the system. There's opportunities for improvement in dispatch. There's some opportunities a little bit in turnout time, but your travel time is quite good. So in making recommendations, which we'll come to in just a minute, we really kind of focus more on the travel time at the 90th percentile. So please kind of hang on to that 4.7 minute time as I go forward. If we can go to the next slide. As you know, the GIS report and the reports that you've got are multiple pages. This is just one slide of it. One of the things that we also do for consideration of the council in evaluating the system is what we refer to as a marginal utility model. I just got done explaining that we design and evaluate systems at the 90th percentile. If you think of it from a risk mitigation or risk assessment component, if you think of it from an insurance industry, you can't cover 100% of the risk. It's the old expression, putting a cop on every street corner. You can't put a fire engine on every street corner. The cost, the council must ultimately and the administration must ultimately balance the demands for service, right? So you try to ensure that you cover 90% of the risk. This slide reflects that actually with the current fire stations applying the five minute travel time, which you're at 4.7, so we round it up to five, that the station three, station two, station one and station four, those four stations will just get over the line and cover 90% of the risk. And we call it marginal utility. The way you read this is if you look at the first top line, the rank one, station three, out of all the calls that you had, that station within five minutes, drive time from that station, that location can get to 2,183 calls. And that captures 42% of the risk of actual demand where calls actually occurred. If you add station two on the second line, they add an additional 1,200 calls. So the total number of calls you can get just using those two stations is 3,400 or 66%. And then station three and station four till you get to the 90th percentile. So you see from station four, or the fourth station I should say, station four to station five, you only add about 3%, 3.5% of emergency activity that you cover. But what you're seeing is that you're about right. You arguably could with four stations cover it, but there's reasons again from that one perspective. I can tell you that from another perspective, perhaps not so. But we do look at that marginal utility model understanding because every station essentially costs you the same, right? To put that unit out there in the cruise. So you want to maximize where you put them in order to ensure that you're meeting your fiduciary responsibility to provide the best service in the most efficient way. So we looked at that in the GIS modeling. We went through several of those which are detailed more so in the full report. But if we go to the next slide, the relevant findings, let me go through those. So what did we look at when we looked at the system? So I'll go through those with the next slide. The one thing that we took note of is the ISO rating, which the city was reevaluated in October of 2018, late last year, and maintained its ISO two rating. The insurance services office ranks fire protection capabilities, public protection, from one being the absolute best, to 10 essentially being no fire protection, having a two puts you in the top. I'm going to look at Dr. Knight 3%, 3.5%, top 3.5% in the nation of ranked departments. So that's where it puts you. So we note that. This shows that they really break into three main areas. The department itself, the 911 system, the emergency communications and water supply. So this helps communities look at that. But again, this is done by the insurance services office. You must take into consideration their perspective is that of how an insurance company would look at it to really prevent large fires in your ability to deal with it. On the next slide, we also look at ISO, looks at engine and ladder company placement. And where those are placed, we evaluated that as well, applying the criteria they do as well, mile and a half for an engine company, et cetera. And so we have those placements that we evaluated. And finally, what we also looked at was independently of the next slide, independently rated properties. For those that don't know it, in the business community, if you have a large enough property, meet certain criteria, ISO actually comes in and independently rates the structure. Larger buildings, commercial properties, et cetera. The fire, yes, sir. The ISO slide one more time. Sure, the table, sir. Right, under fire department. I mean, we got sterling ratings throughout that. But the only one that I noticed where it said credit for company personnel, we earned 6.79 out of a possible 15. What does that category really mean? That really has to do with your on-duty staffing. It has to do with the number of personnel on duty. They'll actually look at your records, not just what you do, but they'll look at records of how many people are on duty every day and evaluate that. Understand ISO in particular wants to ensure that you've got sufficient people on duty at any time to handle a fairly significant incident. And so based on their criteria, which is spelled out, the chief of the department has access to it, how they evaluate that, they only gave you about half credit for that, a little under half credit for that. Okay, thank you. Certainly. Going to, I think we're on the independently rated property, so there is an opportunity to look at those. We did look at those. And then finally, we also sat there and looked at the department on a comparative basis, looking at the fire incident reports. NIFR stands for the National Fire Incident Reporting System. We have a database of every department that reports to that in the nation for five years from 2012 through 2016, it's 10 million records. And so we did a comparative analysis between Sheboygan and several other communities that the city deals with. Overall, we looked at the number of fires per thousand population, and then the NFPA National Fire Protection Association also reports averages for the Midwest region of the country and community populations between 50 and 100,000 and then nationwide. This shows those within the report. I also did it for other communities, Fond de Locke and Chief, I'm trying to remember who the other ones were in there, but Fond de Locke and other communities that you mentioned, Mark LaCrosse. Thank you, Mr. Administrator, that we report in there. One thing that did as we found, and I'll come back to in a moment, is that your deaths, injuries, and fire loss based on these averages, there's some limitations in the way that the NFPA reports their data, and NIFRS is reported. I'm not sure how statistically significant it is because there's wide variance from community to community, how they report it. However, on the comparative basis for which we did have, your numbers, even though you've got very fast travel times in the response, you're rated very highly for the Insurance Services Office for that five-year sample. Injuries, deaths, and fire losses were a bit higher than we saw, in other words. Now per capita, dollar loss against nationwide was lower, but for comparable communities in the Midwest, just a little bit greater. And as you can see, those statistics there for injuries and fire deaths as well. And finally, on the next slide, we also looked at the ability to the one council member about the credit from ISO, the ability to put personnel on scene of a fire. Looking at that five-year period, there were 292 building fires, excuse me, and the department was able, on average, to put 11.2 personnel on scene to mitigate, excuse me, or to handle each of those fires. There are some recommended practices out there, for example, family, single family homes, what should be for that, and the target that you shoot for on those is 15 personnel. The numbers go up if it's a commercial property, if it's a high-rise or apartment building. So you're a little under that 15 ideal that we would see as kind of a minimum for that, for the number of personnel. But again, just doing comparative and looking at it from a multitude of factors. So what does this tell us overall? What did we look at when we saw the department overall? On the next slide, we just summarized those briefly. Your response times are generally strong, particularly your 4.7 minutes and nine minutes total at the 90th percentile, which is how we look at it, is a very positive factor for the city. You've got the existing workloads reflect significant capacity in the system. In other words, you could, if the work expands, if EMS calls grow significantly over the next few years, you would likely not have to add an additional unit. The existing number of units you have can handle that work. And again, your overall risk profile is a moderate risk to the community based on ISO and your historical experience. So those are the positive components. On those areas that provide opportunities moving forward is depending on the actual desired staffing levels for structure fires, you may have some, or not opportunities, I'm sorry, for the challenges moving forward, the challenge to get sufficient personnel on scene of structure fires. You're kind of on that borderline, as I said, reflective as you're getting about 11 to 12 people on scene and you're a few shy of what the recommended practices of 15. Also, that's your fire and injury rates in the community, at least for the data that we have. And I can't speak to the statistical significance, but at least on average is a little bit higher than you would see on other benchmarks. So those are the challenges moving forward. What are the working alternatives then? What are the options for the council? And what we did, going forward on that on the first slide, I'm gonna talk through four potential policies which we outline in some detail. We do make a recommendation, but let me tell you what those are. As we said, when we model a system, we work on travel time, that 4.7 minutes, so we model that at five, that you maintain your current response time, maintain your current stations and that 90th percentile with the existing five stations. The second opportunity is we did in the report is we optimized locations for stations. Some communities are going at a point in the life cycle of the stations where you have an opportunity, you need to replace a station or several stations. As I said, the trick is, right, you want to put the station where the activity is, where the demand for services. You can actually move stations. There's a significant capital cost. There's ripples that go throughout that, but there is an opportunity to maintain the current response time with an optimized of location of four stations. If the city found itself where it needed to replace several stations at once, you could look to optimize those locations and potentially even go with four stations. Not talking about the number of units, talking about the stations. The third alternative that we looked at and explore in the document is to improve the current response time. In other words, you're operating right now at 4.7 minutes at the 90th percentile. What if you were to get there faster? What if you were to go to four minutes? The number four minutes exist in a document from the National Fire Protection Association. It's one that I would tell you very few, arguably if any, cities meet. That's an extremely aggressive response time because at four minutes at the 90th percentile, you're talking two, two and a half minutes on average. I mean, it's a lot of work to do it, but you could do that, arguably, if you had five, if you built five stations at the exact right locations and what we refer to as optimized locations. Obviously, we talk about kind of a status quo. We talk about what if you wanted to go faster. The other alternative, quite simply, is what if you wanted to take your foot metaphorically off the gas pedal a little bit and instead of having the target at five minutes, come off a little bit and set the target at six minutes. Those were the four alternatives we looked at. We went through those in the report. I'll go through those briefly quickly unless there's a question if we can go to the next slide. The first one was maintain, as we said, the status quo with the five stations at the existing locations. You're hitting your 90th percentile. You've got a few minor opportunities to improve a little bit, both within the dispatch and turnout times, so service stays as it currently is, which is a very solid performance. Maybe some opportunities in two areas to improve it even a little bit better. The next opportunity is to look at moving fire stations locations. On the map in the book and the way that you read those is the yellow dots show you where your current stations are and the red dots show you what the optimal location is. Surprisingly, sometimes what you'll find as you do here is several of your current stations are in the optimal location, and that's actually a very positive thing, so you've got them in the right spot. But we always, in the computer modeling, tell the computer, choose the stations that make the most sense, but there is some opportunities to move stations and you could do it with four stations. The question becomes, how many units do you need in those four stations? As we indicated, one of the challenges was with the number of personnel that you have, you're kind of at the minimum of what you would need now, so even if you went to four stations, you would likely need the same number of units. The next opportunity is to go with a four-minute response time to get more aggressive in your travel time. Go from 4.7 down to four, 90 times out of 100, and that would take optimizing the station locations and having five stations at the absolute correct spots. And finally, the last opportunity that we have is to go with a six-minute travel time, but use the existing stations. So those are the ones that we considered for the deployment of the personnel in the field that respond to emergencies. On the next slide, we actually looked at also the administration. One of the things that we noted in discussions with personnel, both of the command staff and the rank and file, is while you have the response resources are sufficient, and we use that term intentionally, sufficient to handle the current levels of performance. Your administrative staffing is challenged currently. Managing the department, you've got EMS, you do transport, your ability to handle issues such as training, public education, the shift supervision, and internal communications effectively is challenged because of that, so one of the recommendations that we may talk about is the resources applied to administration. So coming to the end here, the final slide has to do with our specific recommendations on the department. One of the elements that came up, it was a minor issue. It's one really for the city and the administrator to consider from a budgetary perspective had to do with the cost allocation from a program budgeting. We had that question, 75% of the activity that you do is medically related. You've got three ambulances that are staffed with two personnel, so from a program accounting perspective, you might wanna consider some minor changes to that to more accurate reflect from a budgetary perspective that which is dedicated to EMS versus fire. Yes, sir. That was something that I took interest in because I've been around since the ambulance, since we started with the ambulance and the communities that you do work for, what percent would you say use the recommended accounting procedures that you're talking about here? Council Member, I would tell you that my experience has been in the engagements I've done. They're really kind of all over the place. Every state maybe does it a little bit different. Some want to emphasize or de-emphasize things. Some communities are very concerned about doing a much more detailed program accounting, so they wanna know exactly within the fire department how much is for prevention, how much for fire, how much for EMS. This recommendation moves a little bit closer. I see other, so many do this, but probably just an equal number. Account for the personnel, for the actual salaries and benefits to be under fire. And the only thing in EMS is the medical supplies, the capital equipment, the ambulances themselves, they're all over the place. From the citizen's perspective, I'm gonna be, again, my opinion as a former city manager and fire chief, doesn't make much of a difference. The dollars needed to run the program are there, so from an accounting perspective, I think this provides a little more clarity. And particularly when you're doing 75% of your activity as EMS to do a more way, but it's really probably all over the place. I know Fondalac, Wisconsin has done this for years. And when I talked to somebody in the finance department over in Fondalac a couple of years ago, they were kind of surprised that we were doing the way we were doing it. And the woman that I talked to in finance said that we feel, as far as transparency for our citizens, as to what it's actually costing us to be in EMS, that's why we do it this way. And I think it makes sense from a transparency standpoint. I mean, some of this you see really is, getting back to the historical perspective, the fire service, frankly, 20 years, and I don't mean to diminish that, but historically in the fire service history, only recently got into EMS. I think oftentimes the accounting and the budgeting in most agencies haven't caught up with the reality that 70%, 75%, 80% of what they're doing today is EMS related. The amount of fire activity in the nation, across departments in the country has been cut in half in the last 30 years. So this would be more reflective of what's going on today. But again, we see the practice all over the place. The second recommendation that we have is we noted that there was a year and a half, two years ago, chief, I think all the ambulances kind of, you went through a major infrastructure refresh of your vehicles. We generally recommend that you try to stagger that out so that your fleet is replaced periodically and ambulance at a time. It helps manage the fleet better. It also sits there and avoids kind of some of the disruption that happens when you have to change out vehicles. So we recommend staggering that. Consider additional resources for the administration of the department, the training needs, the communication needs, the quality assurance needs, et cetera needed to have a high performing fire rescue slash EMS system are challenged right now with the current allocation of resources. And finally, ultimately, and this kind of comes from accreditation, one thing that we would recommend the council do is codify or adopt formally your target goal for your fire department, for your chief and your personnel to do. Your current performance, as we said when we do this, it's normally articulated as the travel time. You want to get to 90% of the incidents in X amount of time. You're currently at 4.7 minutes. The recommendation is for the council to do that at five minutes, which is the little bit of buffer that is not mean that they're satisfied with that. They should always be working to improve it. Look at the other segments called processing, dispatch and turnout times, but to memorialize that. It will, in the long term, if you get to the point where things change, you move locations, new facilities come in, demand changes, where the calls are occurring, it would be the trigger for the council to say, we need to make a change because now we're not meeting our five minute, why not? And to do another hard look at that. So those are the recommendations that we have overall that really kind of is the high level review for the council and myself or Dr. Knight, we'll be happy to answer any questions. Mr. Chairman. Mayor. Thank you. You talked a little bit about call processing and improving that and there's some room for that. Have you given us any direction as to how we accomplish that, what things we need to do to get there and maybe some other areas in their operations? Have you given them any other, maybe checklist of things to work on? We've actually had discussions with the chief. One of the things that probably contributed to the numbers that we saw on the call processing is the 911 center recently implemented something called emergency medical dispatch EMD. And in fact, that is the best practice in the industry. Many of you may have seen on television sometimes where a baby is a drowning, right? Pediatric drowning or something and the 911 operator has to talk the parent through how to do CPR on their child, right? That is the second half of EMD or emergency medical dispatch where they do pre-arrival instructions. The first half of that is actually when the call comes in they go through a very structured, very scripted way of looking, of asking questions. You know, it's always what's the location? You know, what's the problem? And then they ask a series of questions and the way the algorithm works is I may ask a question, somebody's got a medical emergency. Are they conscious? No. Are they breathing? No. I have the information I need at that point to know I send everybody to that call as rapidly as possible. If it is what we call a ground level fall, if I was walking and tripped over a wire here and I fell and I was conscious, I was breathing everything else, the reality is whether you get there in four minutes or 14 minutes or 40 minutes medically, my outcome's gonna be the same. So this process, the 911 center recently implemented that and often when it's implemented we see call processing times go up a bit. We would continue to have them to work that and to monitor, in fact, there's a very specific quality to be an accredited agency. They have to go through a very specific, very structured quality assurance process to look at how the calls are being that the operators are following the script, et cetera. So the fact that they did it is a best practice but the data may be reflective of that without digging more into the Sheriff's 911 call processing we couldn't tell you but we just did note that they've recently implemented that which was good to see. The other one, turnout time is an element. We generally like to see that about a minute and a half. That's something that's within management's control. It's usually an awareness issue for the crews. There are techniques you can use, some best practices which we can share with the chief and of course we have recognized recently that chief Romas is going on to the next chapter of his time in public service. So with the department overall, we can continue to do those but there's some fairly generally things. It's generally usually a management and awareness issue for the crews. Thank you. Certainly. Any other questions specifically for Fitch? Marcus. I've got two questions for you. Yes, sir. Referring back to 2017 unit and station workloads. Where it's talking about how many vehicles you're sending to a call or we're sending to a call. Yes. Other communities our size, do they send a comparable number of vehicles? Are we over or under? You want to do it? No, so Dr. Knight get up here. No, I'll back clean up this. Yeah, excellent question. So in a community that only does first response and has an outside provider provide the ambulance service, then we would want you to be just over one. There's gonna be some calls where you need extra assistance, extra hands, but the fact that you provide the ambulance leg as well as first response, it's well within normal range to have two units. One of the things that you have at your disposal to your last question, medical party dispatch is an excellent cost avoidance tool to manage your resources long term. So in the future, as you're able to triage or differentiate calls based on clinical severity, you can maybe send 50 to 70% of those calls with just an ambulance and the higher acuity really serious calls like cardiac arrest and drownings and difficulty breathing, you might send both the engine and the ambulance. So that's the pathway moving forward. That's why Dr. Moller said best practice that it's an excellent tool to have in the communication center moving forward that really will pay considerable dividends for the city long term if you maximize its implementation. One last piece, I just wanna follow up on your question too. In our data when we looked at the dispatch time, that's an aggregated time period. Moving forward as medical party dispatch, it has really five broad categories where it differentiates calls by severity. So the calls that are really severe like a cardiac arrest, they only have to ask two, three, four, five questions tops before they're able to dispatch because that's all the information they need. If you say they're not breathing, then the call is dispatched immediately. Where the ground level fall that Dr. Moller described, they may ask 13 or 14 or 15 questions that may take a lot longer, but it's not critically severe where you have to dispatch immediately. So in the future as an organization, they'll want to measure dispatch by priority. So you can see that the really serious calls are getting out in 45 seconds and maybe other calls are taking a little longer. So I just wanted to make sure you understood that. Thank you. My second question would be in regards to marginal utility. You had mentioned that at four stations, we hit 90, our 90% tile or our 90% is the fifth station why you didn't say we should get rid of it. You didn't say we should keep it. What's your recommendation there? Sure. So well, I'll have to highlight that back to you from a policy perspective. So stick with me. Operationally, we're saying that you only have to have four to meet 90% of your calls, but there's a reason you have a station in that community and there may be other non-operational reasons, considerations for geography only, considerations for neighborhood, expectations for service. There are other reasons that you may want to staff that station. We're just saying that operationally, if you had to make really tough fiscal decisions, you only need four to cross that 90th percentile, but you may have a geographic area that receives a longer response time. The second element has to do with the number of personnel you can, the second element has to do with the number of personnel you can put on scene of a structure fire. So while it represents a smaller percentage of the incidents, as I indicated, you're right now historically doing between 11 and 12. You could do it from four stations, but the implication is or kind of the caveat is if you get rid of that unit, you're gonna impact your ability to assemble what we call an effective response force to handle the structure fires. So again, the challenge in this sort of work is there's multiple perspectives we can look at it, so you could do it from four stations, not a problem. But now the problem is, as long as you're running nothing but activated fire alarms, odor investigations and medical calls, you'd be fine. When you get fires, that's gonna be the challenge because now you're gonna be, unless you took that unit out of the fifth station and moved it to one of the other four. So does that answer your question? It sure does, thank you. Certainly. Alderman Boran. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just before the new year, my wife and I had a chance to attend a swearing-in ceremony for our two new assistant chiefs, so we've have addressed management to an extent. We promoted two excellent individuals, Chuck Butler and Dean Klein, and now we're gonna have to be replacing Chief Romus. My question is, do most of the departments that you work would have a succession plan of encouraging the people to move into lower management and then middle management, and then eventually the chief. I know if I was to join the fire department as a young person, eventually, just the way I'm wired, someday I'd wanna be chief. Is there a problem with succession plans or getting people to move from the lower levels up to wanting to be chief, and how can we cultivate that in our department? Sure, and that is an excellent question, and it has several layers to it. So let me talk broadly about the fire service. One of the challenges is a small proportion of the agency really wants to move up, and there's a condition that we see nearly every fire department across the country, and there's compression issues in the pay and schedule when you bridge from shift work to administrative capacity. And that's a limiting factor for a lot of employees that don't wanna come off a shift work, and the pay differential is compressed, so there's not a significant enough enticement or enhancement to encourage employees to bridge that gap. So that's one aspect that's pretty difficult. The other aspect when you talk about succession planning, it's absolutely best practice to have that. One of the difficulties in a public environment unlike you have some advantages in a private sector is it's difficult to target talent and have a disproportionate support system for those employees when you have competitive labor agreements and things like that that guide the promotional process. So there's some limitations that kind of bump up against common sense on how we would naturally want to do it. So that's a challenge that you really have to work through, but that compression issue is certainly a limiting factor in most fire departments to bridge up. I don't know if you had anything you wanted to answer. Okay. Older person, Donahue. We're really welcome to gather. Excellent. And I really appreciate the insights. The one question I had, I'm not sure I understand the data that you rely on to determine the organization, the administrative staffing is inadequate. Just going through, I know that about 34% of our employees are management employees and it seems within the business structures I'm used to, that's pretty heavy. Typically I don't even see that. And I was just wondering, you said, administrative staffing is challenged to fully address ongoing training, education and so forth. Sure. How would you come to that? So I mentioned before that we rely heavily on the data and so very data driven. However, there's also a qualitative component. We spoke to rank and file members, we spoke to command staff, we spoke to the chief, spoke to the city administration. In our experience, so the 34% is probably supervisory and management, many of those on shift, at least in the budget that when we were valuing it with you there were three positions that were full time dedicated day. There was the chief at the time it was deputy assistant, I think it's now two assistants. So there's three personnel. You're running an EMS system and a transport component to that. The demands of the administration, the 40 hour personnel, to handle that with the training requirements. There's no dedicated, for example, training resource. The quality assurance components that need to go with that. The other logistical issues and stuff. And then internal communications was a piece that we heard from in ensuring that the priorities established by the chief and the command staff are being communicated and monitored and evaluated on an ongoing basis. So it was really related to those three personnel and then kind of the qualitative comments that we got. And then based on our experience of looking at other departments of comparable size, that's the reason for the conclusion that the administration's challenged with a number of personnel because it's just a lot of, for lack of a better term, 40 hour tasks that have to be done. No, no, no, no, no. The data, I mean, the data on the response times, station locations, et cetera. On the administration is more derived from the qualitative and the comments from stakeholders in the system as well as our observations of comparable size communities. And the administration officials. Yeah. The one I would, I'm gonna answer in two ways. Again, if I was chief, if I was the chief of this department, the first place I would look at would be training, frankly, generally, that would be the one. However, there's also an opportunity that comes here and it is management is more of an art form. You've had some changes recently, it was indicated, but the chief is leaving. There's gonna be a new chief coming in. They're gonna work with the administrator and the council. I think that's a good opportunity for that new leadership to evaluate that, look at this report, let them look at that and come up with some recommendations. One thing that I'm gonna say it now, you're publicly, Dr. Knight always says it, you know, we don't just leave this report here, we remain available to this chief, to the next chief, to the administrator. As you go forward and you have questions at our quick phone call, we encourage the administrator or the new chief to call us, hey, what did you mean? What do you think? I'm considering this, we are more than happy to take those calls and give that feedback. That's just something that we do for any of our clients. Okay, does that answer your question? Yeah. Okay. Older person will. Thank you, Chair. Just to kind of expand on what older, Mary Lundana, he was talking about is, sorry. I guess another way to look at it from just in my layman's terms is, fire department is 24-7 and it takes a certain amount of people for training and for administration and things like that. So we may be at the lower level we're getting by, we're doing what needs to be done with the crewing that we have for five stations. But what you're saying is that for us to do even better, we need a few more management personnel like for training and things like that. So by bringing in a couple more of these positions, we're gonna also help us when we, in the future, if we were to increase our crewing. There's kind of that qualitative piece back to that. You can anticipate the multi-year and the back of the data report. There's an appendix that shows kind of the year-to-year increase in call volume. There's another characteristic, Dr. Knight knows this, I speak of Fair Mountain and an element that's lost in many communities is what's been referred to in the literature as the silver tsunami, the aging population. And if you look at that demographics, the need for medical care of an aging population is significant and many communities look at a straight line assumption that if we've been increasing 3% a year, it's gonna keep going 3%. No, it isn't. It's gonna increase more dramatically. So when 75% of your work is EMS, when you recognize the training requirements, the quality assurance requirements, et cetera, that's the concern that at least I think we have as a firm. And so we're sensitive to that in looking at. So yeah, so the administration, and again, how you do that is in our form and the chief needs to drive that, but there will be a need, we believe, for some additional assistance in that area. Thank you. I just have one other question that goes back to the EMS and the accounting practices because that's something that we've discussed over the years. One of the questions I have just from your history and working with other communities, if we were to balance EMS and the 73% or whatever being EMS and the assets and what the costs are for having our ambulance service, the concern that I have is if you didn't have the ambulance, it's all fire, correct? Yeah. And the thing is when we did have just the fire, we were sending our trucks for every ambulance that was being called. So we were still attending every single call. So my question to you guys is, and I know it's a quandary of statements, but if we balance it to show 73% of everything for EMS, I don't want the public to look at EMS as it's a much more costly endeavor it is, but we'd still have to pay those assets even if we weren't in the ambulance business per se. How do you present something like that? Okay, so you guys are excellent. Let me answer it this way. The motivation for why you want to account the way you account is really the driving factor. So when the question was asked earlier, I think you asked that question when Dr. Moller was answering it. You know, a lot of times what we see when agencies get really granular, it's because they have a program budgeting process that drives that kind of detail. In other states that maybe have a fire readiness fee or something that's statutorily required to account for all dollars in that exact fund, that drives that kind of accounting practice. To your point exactly, if all the dollars are coming in and there's sunk costs, if you will, associated with readiness for fire suppression, then you have to somehow account for that. So you're absolutely right. You can't, what we caution agencies for is you cancel can't forget how you got here, right? Because you don't want a future council, 12 years from now coming back and going, we're not gonna do EMS anymore and we can operate the fire suppression on 18% of the overall budget and we know that's not accurate. So it's really just a preference for how you want to account for the dollars. It's not driving a decision making for how you're gonna perform, if that's fair. That's fair. Thank you. The only thing I'll add to is, yeah, we weren't recommending to do the 76% of the budget EMS. Generally what a lot of communities do in the way, at least I've approached it both as a practitioner and in this sort of role, is you assess what would you do if you weren't doing any EMS? What would you still need to do fire? And then it's that incremental component above it. So when we looked at the recommendation was, for those ambulances, the two people across three shifts, that's three units, six people, three shifts, 18, and then 75% of activity, because they go to fire calls too, as the ambient. So it really is, Dr. Knight indicated, what are you trying to accomplish by it? We do believe those changes come, but they're probably better to go a little more slowly. So, sir. Mr. Mayor. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. When you said that we might be able to get by with four firehouses, how much of that was predicated on the fact that we've annexed two large pieces of land on both the Southeast and the Southwest side of our community that had no data to go into your formulas, because they've just been annexed, and with those annexations, does that change your recommendation? Well, our recommendation, just to be clear, was not to go to four stations. We just looked at the alternatives, trying to bookend the realm of possibilities. We actually did consider that in the detail of one of the models. We noted those areas, and here's what happens in communities a lot of times, your newer development areas, the areas that you annex, don't generate demand. They're just, they're not causing demand today. You need to anticipate that they will sometime in the future. Part of the other reason that we didn't recommend going to four stations, among the number of units, et cetera, is because you have annexed areas, you do have development coming in. The risk from a community profile perspective of those, some of those are very large structures, they're fully sprinklered. So from a fire protection perspective, they're really kind of, they have a high potential if they have an incident, but the frequency with which they'll have them is very low. But over the long term, those patterns change. So the data doesn't reflect that, you're right. The data does not reflect that. So the model would show you could get by with four as those areas start demanding services, activated fire alarms, medical calls, maybe some fires now. Over time, you would need that fifth station still. So that's why we kind of stayed with that. Thanks for that clarification, I appreciate it. Sir. Alderperson Decker. 11 personnel versus recommended 15, is that just because of our reduction in personnel, we don't have enough personnel to meet that, or is it just that they were able to handle the fires? Again, kind of to the question asked by the mayor, limitations of the data somewhat. So historically, what you've actually had on scenes, many times what you'll have is the first company will arrive and while they were dispatched to a structure fire, they realize, you know, I'm just gonna use the old scenario, it's not that significant. So they cancel others. So when they get back to the station and write the report, they only note the first 10 or 11 or 12 people that showed up because the other ones got canceled, they never made it there. That's one of the potentialities. But you do, even looking at your minimum staffing, which is 16, right? Chief, I think 16, right, 16, on that 15, to remove units and remove personnel, you're kind of right on the border. That's the reason, even with five, even if that, while you theoretically could do it with four stations based on today's demand, removing the units, now you've dropped below the numbers that you would be challenged in structure fires when the times when they occur. Okay, thank you. Any other questions? Elder Prism Boran? Yes, sir. Chairman, I got some information from the finance department that was provided by our billing service. I actually have three years, 2015, 16, and 17. I'll just go over the 17 figures. The average billing for a call, a gross call was $961. The average collection was 341 of that gross, and we were writing off about $620. And I think I read somewhere in the report that we're collecting. And that was about, that was for 2017, collecting around 36% of the gross. Are there any opportunities that you see from looking over this? I know, you know, we probably all communities have the same payer mix with Medicare, Medicaid, private, self-pay, workers comp. Are there any suggestions, or is this pretty typical of what's going on around the country as far as what we're collecting? Or any thing that you can recommend to enhance our collections? Yes, one of the advantages that we recommend is periodically just putting it out for competitive bid on your billing. And that generally drives the next generation of a firm that's maybe a little more energetic about collecting because they're paid on a proportion of their overall collections. The difficulty in, big picture again, the difficulty in the ambulance market right now is it's very unstable. And more and more, if you look across the country, more and more municipalities and counties are assuming those responsibilities because many of the private providers are making single-digit profit margins and they have huge amounts of capital liability associated with that for single-digit profit margins. So a lot of our clients, you know, they're getting letters from private providers that say, you know, dear John, sorry, but I'm gonna need another million dollars worth of subsidy if you want me to continue to provide services in the community because it's all capitated costs. So the revenue models are really challenging right now. So what you've described is pretty typical of what we see. There's huge write-offs and, you know, we focus on the collections, but until the revenue structure is fixed at the federal level, I don't see a significant change, but you might have a better performing billing company than others. And that comes back when we talked about administrative capacity as well, that quality assurance component and EMS particularly is very, very important to your overall billing success. We read about three or four years ago, we had a private ambulance company over in Plymouth, Wisconsin that went under. And I know personally, because I know somebody who worked as a paramedic over there who's now with Orange Cross, but their problem is exactly what you said. They had probably the same pair mix that we did, but they didn't have any deep pockets backing up the business. Orange Cross, our private provider in town here, of course has the two hospitals to provide the deep pockets for the shortfall. And of course ours is our general fund to make up the difference for the lack of collections. But I certainly see the problem with the private companies and unless there's some deep pockets like either hospitals or a municipality making up the shortfalls, it's not a business you'd wanna be in in a million years. Yes, it's a quality of service policy decision. Alderperson Donahue. And as sure as Alderborn brings up the collection rates he knows, it's like Pavlov's dog, I'm gonna respond. I do wanna point out, I do wanna point out though, I understand that that collection percentage seems small, but we come very close to 100% collection of allowable costs. And that is a key difference. So I don't want the public who may actually be listening to this meeting or I don't know if Diana is here, but I don't want anyone to think that somehow the city is fumbling the ball and running that somehow the city is fumbling the ball and we're only collecting 36% and we're letting hundreds of thousands of dollars out there. We collect what's allowed. So when we all see our insurance bills or our Medicare bills, Dr. Bill's 500, insurance pays 200 and that's just the way it is. And so we just need to keep that in mind. Excellent point. Alderperson Boran. I just, I understand what you're saying Alderperson Donahue, but at the end of the year you can't put what you're writing off in the bank. It's gotta come from somewhere so it's coming into the general fund. And with Orange Cross, their shortfall, our hospitals are paying for the shortfall. So when you had a business in your law practice, I had a business and boy, it would have been nice that we didn't have to write things off, but unfortunately we have to, but at the end of the day, when you're writing off $620 on a $900 call, somebody's gotta make up the shortfall. You can't put the shortfall in the bank. The shortfall is the actual amount that's reimbursed. So I think we need to not feel that there's a universe of collectible money that we are somehow missing out on. We bring in about a million dollars a year from ambulance service that we wouldn't bring in if we didn't have the ambulance service. So. The way we could do it. Okay, let's wrangle it back in. Any other questions for the folks at Fitch? Alderperson Svalio. Regarding organizational structure, how does our administrative structure compare to similar communities of our size? As I indicated probably for five stations, the number of personnel total FT's in the budget, probably short one or two positions administratively. When I say I'm talking about 40 hours. So the chief and the administration tried to take advantage and did take advantage of the battalion chiefs. But again, the challenges is that they're on duty now and the continuity doesn't exist. So a little thinner than what we would normally see. Again, not aberrant, but that's why we made the recommendation. Thank you very much. Any other questions directed for the Fitch Associates? Otherwise I want to call up the fire chief for any comments you might have. Alderperson Wolff. Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you to the Fitch organization for bringing us this information. There's been many, many years of deep discussion. As you can see how things get a little warm once in a while. I think we're doing the best of what has been decided over the many decades of council decisions and fire chiefs recommendations and things like that. So I'm very pleased with the report. I'm glad to see that a lot of the recommendations you guys are making, we've actually talked about in some way, shape, or form. So you've definitely helped drive a stake in the ground for us to be able to do a better measuring and decision making. So thank you again. Thank you. Chief. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Is that what you, your chairman of the Committee of the Hall? Sure. All right, Mr. Chairman. Right. I was approached recently by city administrator, Daryl Hofflin to talk about what we as a department have been doing and are doing or planning on doing with these recommendations that were brought forth by Fitch. So I have a little presentation. So ladies, next slide, please. All right, I'm just gonna take them. There's four recommendations basically and I'm gonna just take them in order one at a time from top to bottom. First one was the program accounting change. I've spoken to city administrator Hofflin and our finance manager and I will follow their direction. That's their area of expertise. The finance director doesn't tell me how to command a fire. I'm not gonna tell him how to run finances. So he's a great person. He's very smart. I trust him. And if he tells me he wants to do it this way, I don't have any problem with that. I'll do it anyway that he would like to do it. However, I would have an issue if that resulted in budget cuts or staffing cuts. Then I would be opposed to whatever's going on because the department still has to run and I believe it's running very efficiently right now. A number, next slide please. Number two, the ambulance replacement schedule. When I arrived in 2014, the ambulances were falling apart right in front of my eyes. We were borrowing ambulances from Manitowoc. At one time in the summer, we had two of them in town at the same time. So I went to, at that time, city administrator Imodio with a proposal and he agreed with me and we found a way. I wanted four new ambulances and he said, chief, that's just not gonna happen. So he said, what about this refurbishment program? It's cheaper and reduces cost. I thought, I'm familiar with it, but I hadn't looked into it. So because of what he said, I did. So we looked into the refurbishment program and that's what we ended up doing with our ambulances. Refurbishment just means they picked the box off the old chassis. 90 plus percent of the problems are with the engine, the cab, the suspension and the chassis. That's just what it is. So we got four new chassis from Ford and then they reconfigured the box and clean it up and paint it and clean it up and do things like that and they dropped the box down basically and they bolted back onto that new chassis. So we did that and we saved $240,000 I think. All right, but that system took a long time and I wouldn't do it that way again and I don't have a couple of hours to explain it to you, but it didn't go well, it took a long time and we're dealing with what we have right now. It's okay, things are fine, but I would not recommend going through that process again, at least not this next time for the first time. So I didn't wanna do all of them at once like we did before. So we had the idea, my staff, to spread it out over a period of time. So my recommendation was in 22 to buy one new ambulance because right around five years or so, something's gonna go wrong probably in a major way with at least one of the ambulances. That's what we've, that historically is what happened with our last fleet. So we thought one in 22, two in 23 and one in 24. And I have that in a capital budget. There's a lot of ongoing discussions. Administrator Hofflin is constantly talking to me about doing things and moving things and splitting things and stretching things out. That's his job and because I'm one department of what a dozen or 10 or 11 in the city, we try to accommodate that, but he tries to get us what he can and what we need and he has succeeded so far and things are going very, very well in terms of apparatus replacement. So this has been on the books for three or four years already. So we are addressing that. The next slide please. Number three, additional administration resources. Everyone's familiar with the Fire 2020 plan that came out three years ago. And in that plan, I requested two more additional command staff members. And I also recommended an addition of six firefighters in the fire service because of three shifts. When you add one person, you have to add three. Everything is in multiples of three except for 40 hour or command staff level. But in the fire service, it's three. So every shift has an addition of one body. So my goal was to try not to send, well now engine four on the north side, the far north side or truck five on the far south side out because they're stationed by themselves. They don't have an ambulance or a paramedic unit with them. Because they're stationed by themselves, my goal was to not send them out with two people, but with a minimum of three. That was my goal. And that's explained in that plan that you all have or have seen. So that was my plan there. We did add a battalion chief in 17 in the middle of the year in July and it has helped our command staff greatly. I can't even begin to tell you how much that has helped our department out. It really has. And that's been a great addition. And then right now you, the council approved and I wanna thank you for that. We went from assistant chief one, one deputy chief to two assistant chiefs. Now this model is starting to flow up. I can see advantages happening right now as with the start of the year. It's a great, I knew it was gonna be good at it's doing everything I thought it would. That's helping a great deal. And then we're also looking in a combination with this to upgrade the two civilian positions which haven't been upgraded, one for 18 years and one for about 11 years. So their jobs are completely different. They're doing completely different things right now. So if we put that all together, I'm looking at maybe not adding another chief depending on how all of this goes. I believe that with these upgrades and changes of duties and responsibilities among these positions that we will probably be able to not do that. But we'll see what happens, but I'm willing to try anything. It's all about efficiency. This idea actually came from city administrator Hofflund and I thought about it long and hard and I thought, yeah, you know what? I think you're right. I think this is a possibility. So we're looking all the time at making things efficient and this is just another example. Slide four, please. The codification performance baseline, Fitch did a great job of explaining it. This is a very complicated thing. We have different response patterns. We have code three lights and siren. We have code two. We measure these by the code three responses. Dispatch has changed. A lot of great new modernization of that area. It's been tremendous. They're under great leadership and Bruce was right or I don't know if it was Steve or Bruce that mentioned it, but it's a very exact, it's a national standard. It's state of the art. The dispatchers have just undergone training. It's been about a year now, but every six months they look at what they're doing and they try to make it even more efficient and they try to make it better. And we just went through that about maybe a month or two ago. So things are changing and we're gonna get to the point where everything is codified, everything is set and then we're gonna be off and running and we're gonna be comparing apples to apples every year instead of apples to oranges like we're doing right now. But we're on our way. And as Fitch said, we are response times are excellent. They just flat out are. In fact, there was something you came to me with something you were highly, you questioned our, when our ambulances went to a transport, yeah, turn around time from the time that we may contact and around the run to the time we're back in service was extraordinarily low, which I'm paraphrasing blue people's minds. And we looked into it and found out that it was a combination, maybe it wasn't all that way, but our people in the field do an excellent job of trying to get back in service sooner than later and being available for a run or a fire or any other incident that comes up. So we've been working on this again since about 2014. And with that EMD program, which is a great thing, they started it, they've been updating it and that's caused some delays and that's the process we have to follow. So that's what we're following. And as they change, we need to change and be adaptive to and we're doing that. That concludes my response. Does anybody have any questions at all? Any questions for the fire chief? All right. Thank you very much. And I want to thank Fitch also. It's been a pleasure working with you gentlemen. One of the few organizations and individuals that when I asked for something, emails, telephone calls, responses, I actually got them. Right away. So thank you. Thanks, chief. All right. We'll move into items for discussion and possible action. 3.1 RO number 180, 1819 by the fire chief submitting the draft summary report of the operational and department structural review of the Sheboygan fire department prepared by Fitch and associates. Is there any questions or general discussion on the fire study itself in a whole or any questions? Alderperson Boran. Chairman, I guess I would be looking for somebody to make a recommendation on what we do with this report. Is this something that Daryl you would be working on with the finance department and the fire department to possibly implement some of these things or what should we do with the report at this point? In reviewing the different recommendations specifically addressed by our fire chief, Romus, the only item I see that's outstanding is the accounting that you alluded to. So I will work with the finance director and place this as an agenda item for the finance and personnel committee for discussion soon. Actually, we're gonna start already discussing the 2020 budget. So it's not, it's timely for us to begin this discussion. Thank you. Alderperson Donahue. And I wonder if a motion to file would be appropriate, but I think that the rich data in this report and also the firefighters report from, gee, at least a couple of years ago, I think it's really nice to have that granular level of information just readily available to us. So procedurally, I'm not sure what we'll be looking. I believe the procedural motion that we're looking for and someone correct me if I'm wrong, we have to refer it back to council in some form. So we're recommending council to file to do something to it, but the motion has to go back to the common council. Motion to file. Sorry, I would move to file. Second. All right, there's been, just for clarification, this is a motion to recommend back to council to file. Right. All right, there's been a motion and a second. Any further discussion on the motion or the fire study? Alderperson Wolfe. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to, again, thank our local fire department union for the great report that they put together. Again, I want to thank the Fitch Group for presenting the information. And of course, Chief Romus with his 2020. Again, like, like Marilyn had said, we are very lucky that we have the talented crew, the talented personnel in our fire department. And other departments, of course. But this has been a discussion and a lot of questioning for many, many years where the data and the reports have all said the same thing. We've got talented organizations running things as efficiently as possible. There's always room for improvement, but again, we have to take it one step at a time. So thank you. Thank you. Ron. I do question on the, the city should codify a status quo performance baseline. I think that is a good idea. It is still kind of out there hanging, something for the council to look at. Once we're sure we have accurate data, as the chief mentioned, we still work ourselves into that. But the idea, we actually set some sort of a goal for the fire department or a plan for the fire department or a strategic plan or whatever we wouldn't not talk strategic plan, but a goal, that codification, which was the last item that they mentioned. I don't want to lose that when we file this. I think that should come up at some point in time. Do you want to respond, Darrell, at all? Good catch. And I think chief Romans did identify that the department is in the process of looking at codification of some of the policies and practices. That would be a licensing hearings and or lips licensing public public safety. So we will make sure that's on a future agenda. Any other thoughts, comments, questions regarding the motion at all? All right, seeing none, we'll go into voice vote. All those in favor of referring this back to the council with a recommendation to file, please state aye. Anyone opposed? Any abstentions? Chair votes aye. All right, seeing no more items on the agenda, I'm looking for a motion to adjourn. There's been a motion to adjourn in a second. All those in favor of adjourning, please state aye. Anyone opposed? Chair votes aye. We are adjourned at 724. Thank you, everyone.