Fire department cuts 11 positions
Chief will shift work duties at stations to help save $1.5 million; no layoffs are in the new budget
The Palo Alto Fire Department will lose 11 positions — one-tenth of its full-time staff — under a restructuring plan designed to solve a budget shortfall.
The City Council last week unanimously approved the plan, which cuts seven firefighters and four apparatus operator positions. All the positions are vacant.
The department plans to shift personnel from slower stations to busier ones, and from slower times of day to busier times, reducing daytime staffing from 27 firefighters to 26 and cutting nighttime staffing by three.
The new schedule, to be implemented by January, relies on “cross-staffing” — using firefighters to staff ambulances.
“A crew of three people, instead of being responsible for just one piece of equipment, a fire engine, is now responsible for two pieces of equipment, a fire engine and an ambulance,” Palo Alto Fire Chief Eric Nickel said. “Depending on what the call is, the crew jumps into the appropriate piece of apparatus.”
He said cross-staffing and dedicating personnel to busier times of the day is an innovative approach.
“The goal is try to maintain the same level of service while saving money and still meeting our performance responsibilities to the community,” the chief said. “And the other objective we set with this is to try to balance the work load out. We have some stations that are very busy, and some stations that are very slow. In fact, some crews spend less than an hour on emergency calls.”
The move was deemed necessary because of revenue lost when Stanford reduced its emergency services contract with the city. The university closed a little-used fire station at the SLAC laboratory in 2012, later contracting with Menlo Park Fire for coverage in that area, and began negotiations with Palo Alto Fire for a reduced contract to cover the remaining fire station in the center of campus.
The new contract left Palo Alto Fire between $1.5 million and $2 million short in its annual budget of about $31 million, Nickel said. About 85 percent of that is personnel costs.
Cross-staffing will allow for a fourth ambulance unit, avoid layoffs, keep all six city stations open 24 hours a day, and still provide the same level of response time, according to a news release from the city. Nickel said the department’s goal is to reach at least 90 percent of all calls within 8 minutes, and it has been doing that at a rate between 92 and 98 percent.
Nickel said the department’s average response time to Code 3 emergencies, which require lights and sirens, is around 5.5 to 6 minutes. If staff cuts resulted in lower performance, he said, the department would go back to the city manager and council to say it needs more assistance.
Part of the motivation behind the new scheduling grew out of a trend in emergency services: There are fewer fire calls and many more calls for medical emergencies. The new model will deploy 26 firefighters, EMTs and paramedics from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., when two-thirds of those service calls occur, and 24 at night.
“We not only had to find a way to save $1.5 million, but we needed a more efficient way to deploy our personnel in response to the shifts in when our services are needed the most,” Nickel said. “Our daytime population nearly doubles every day, and when we analyzed when our call volume is the highest, it made sense to shift personnel to be available during those times.”
Only 17 percent of Palo Altans are age 65 or older, but they make up half of all ambulance transports to hospitals, Nickel said. Department data shows that while the population has been aging, resulting in a 50 percent increase in ambulance transports, fire incidents are down by one-third.
The department’s budget problems might not end here. The firefighters union contract ends next summer, and has a large unfunded pension liability that Nickel said has grown by several million dollars a year over the past few years.
“So, we have to find a way to be as efficient as we can, while still maintaining our service levels,” he said.
One area where efficiency might be improved: False alarms at local businesses. The department answers around 9,000 emergency calls a year, Nickel said, and about 1,300 of those are false alarms.
“We have far too many false alarms,” the chief said. “That ties up our resources for unnecessary reasons. So we’ll be going to the business community, saying you have to get your false alarm issues under control, or we’ll start billing you for those responses.”