From a Fire Hose
This week
City Council Meeting
The Council met on Monday with only one item on the main agenda: approval of bids for Ashwood Park. This is a new park in the Ashwood neighborhood - and it will be renamed prior to building. The plan was straightforward, and utilizes the park area in an interesting way by providing natural play areas. The Council approved the action, which allows the city to bid for the project.
Public Safety Commission Meeting
The Public Safety Commission hosted a joint meeting with the City Council on Tuesday. The main purpose of the meeting was to receive information from the Otsego Fire Chief on the results of a staffing study and the initial designs for a fire station. The meeting was chaotic and not well run.
As a resident and a taxpayer of Otsego, any information that the city collects and puts together for a public presentation is yours. You paid for it. You have every right to see the public record. However, in this case the slides have not been published for the public to see. They weren't provided ahead of time. They weren't available at the meeting. I can think of no legitimate reason for this, but the slides will not be published until later this month, despite requests from the public to publish them immediately.
The tone of the meeting was set when the Chief took a moment during his presentation to call me out by name:
Councilman Dunlap, you have said no one has died in a fire, but let's not wait for that to happen before we fix this.
This is a disgusting comment and an obvious mischaracterization of my position. I have pointed out in the past that Otsego has not had a death from a fire related incident in at least 20 years which is as far back as the fire records go. I've also searched newspapers to try to find any additional records beyond 20 years and haven't found any. However, I point this out as a response to the insinuation that Otsego residents aren't safe. I have never - and would never - claim that we shouldn't look at alternatives until someone dies from a fire. That is absurd and insulting.
How did we get here?
Meeting after meeting, study after study. Consultants, consultations, and joint discussions. Eventually, the city ends up at the decision to create their own fire department. Along the way, the Council abdicated their responsibility to examine the costs, perhaps because they were led astray with the ridiculous notion that it won't cost anything more.
I was in the meeting when it was said. Prior to standing for office, I was in every meeting trying to understand the decision-making process. But on this occasion, the voters had just elected me. I had not yet been sworn in, so I had no voice or vote, yet. The consultant told the Council that creating a fire department wouldn't cost anything more, and may even be cheaper than the contracts. "I believe that!" Councilmember Darkenwald shouted out as he shot me a glance. The Council then voted to start a department. It was unanimous.
Only a few weeks prior, the Sheriff had visited the Council for an annual report. He was recommending adding patrol hours, and perhaps anticipated some push-back. Sheriff Deringer challenged the Council to perform a cost-benefit analysis to determine if starting our own police department would be cheaper. He's confident that he can provide a better quality of service at a lower cost to the taxpayer. Of course he is, because he understands the economics of it.
It should come as no surprise that the Council never did a study to find out if creating our own police department would be cheaper - it wouldn't. We all know that.
But the action of starting our own fire department... no one ever asked how much it would cost until I was seated. No one ever did the study to determine what we would be asking the taxpayers for. We have made it this far without doing basic due-diligence to determine what it was going to cost. Over the past couple years, I have done my best to try to determine that number. I looked at historical data, cities that had transitioned away from contracts, and cities that had switched back. A sea of data to try to understand what it would be costing the taxpayer. I knew it was going to be more.
And here we are: after creating a fire department, hiring a chief, buying four fire trucks, land for two fire stations, and designs for a fire station... we are finally starting to compare costs. And the costs are higher than I had anticipated.
Contracts vs Municipal Fire Department
In order to understand the difference, we're going to have to make some assumptions. We need to try our best to predict what the costs of the future contracts will be. The city presented some projections that had those contracts increasing rapidly. The city predicts that the contracts will nearly double in 4 years. If that seems unlikely to you, it's because it is. I also projected out the contracts costs using standard statistical techniques, and I came up with numbers that were not quite as dramatic.
What you can see is a probability of those contract costs, and the predictions the city provided. The reason that the city provided such high numbers is because they used only the last 3 years as a predictor. But something has happened over the last 3 years that may be inflating those numbers... mainly an economy in shambles. To be fair, my experience tells me we aren't going to get out of that economic hole for quite some time - so anticipating higher contract costs maybe isn't out of the realm of possibility. However, even assuming that inflation will continue to be significant: the predictions from the city are still quite unreasonable.
That is not to say it's a bad comparison to make. We should be looking at what the possible and probable contract costs will be in the future. That way, we can compare them to what a fire department will cost us. This is a comparison that is long overdue.
What we are starting to see, however, is the demonization of our contract agencies - our neighbors - in order to justify our own bullheaded decision to blaze ahead with a standalone department. I warned about this in prior newsletters and it was on full display during this meeting.
Why are the contracts going up? There was a brief mention that the contracts are mostly tied to property values, and those will continue to go up. This is fair, but it also discounts the other factors that are important to understand: population growth and inflation. We need to understand these factors in order to answer the very basic question: are we getting a good deal with the contracts? In other words: are we getting stiffed?
In order to answer this question, we need to account for these factors - these confounding variables. It's fairly easy to account for population growth: just take the contract costs and divide it by the total population. We also take the amounts and adjust them for inflation in order to remove the "inflationary effect" on the money we are being charged. When we do that, we get the "real cost" increase of $0.73 per capita per year on average. However, we can go further - because the formulas for the contracts have not changed since they were first implemented. We know that the contracts consider property values, and so we can remove the effect of inflated property values from the per capita (inflation adjusted) costs as well. When we do that, we see that the annual cost increase is negative $0.06 - essentially nothing. The contracts go up because of 3 factors: population growth, inflation, and increasing property values. That's it. We're getting a great deal.
This doesn't mean you won't feel an increase, however. Knowing the reason for the increase doesn't magically make you have to write a smaller check to the government. Inflation sucks, home overvaluation sucks, and a population that is increasing faster than we can potentially handle sucks as well. What this does mean, though, is that we cannot blame our neighbors for these increasing costs. They aren't stiffing us. We're getting a good deal. It would be foolish to abandon those contracts - especially right now.
The multi-million dollar question then becomes: how much will a municipal fire department cost us?
The answer, it turns out, is: a lot.
Here's how the costs break down for the current plan:
Operating costs, including staffing and supplies: $2.14MM annually
Capital equipment costs: $1.425MM (probably in year 2026)
Fire station: $19.5MM - $21.5MM which is around $1.44MM annually for a fire station bond, starting next year for the next 20 years (estimated as this hasn't been provided, yet)
Fire trucks: $3.8MM, but paid for through reserves and ARPA funds.
Equipment maintenance and depreciation: around $280-410k per year
Add it all up and - depending on when these costs actually end up in the budget - you're looking at somewhere between $1.6MM to $5.6MM in expenses, with it tapering down to an annual cost around $4MM per year. That includes operating expenses and bond payments.
And yet, it was claimed that it would eventually be cheaper than the contracts. How? Well, if we take the maximum possible amount the contracts could be - and then go slightly higher - and then we assume that we can somehow magically operate our department at only inflation rates... and subtract out the contract costs, then the cost of owning our own department will apparently catch up to each other in 2030. Oh, and it's not the total cost but just the operating cost. If you include the actual cost of owning our own fire department then the two won't catch up until around 2055 - which also happens to be past the expected life of the firehouse - so we'd need a new one by then, anyway, and the costs would shoot right back up. And, again, that's using the most ridiculous expectations about contract costs possible - it's being over generous to the proponents of a fire department. It assumes no new equipment, additional hires, or additional trucks or expansion.
Can we operate a fire department without increasing the operating budget above inflation? I doubt it. Especially since the Chief wasn't able to do it before at his previous department.
It's practically an economic fact: rates increase faster in cities that have their own department. This is especially true for departments that cannot offer their services for contract and are unable to spread the costs out. This is due to the fact that the equipment and maintenance for fire departments is very high. They are not cheap to operate. And they tend to have a lot of political will behind them to increase budgets as the costs go up. No council member wants to be the one to deny breathing equipment to a firefighter, even if it is the most expensive brand. When you remove the contract from the equation, there are actually less checks and balances in the decision process. The chief becomes a politically appointed position - rather than dealing with the cold hard facts of a contract.
The scrutiny that the contracts and the contracting agencies are going through right now will never happen for our own fire department.
But we're big enough
By far, the most common argument I have heard over the past few years supporting the creation of our own fire department is that "we're big enough." As if it's written somewhere that once you reach a certain population you must have a fire department. It's a non-sequitur, but it's an argument that captivates a lot of people because it seems to touch on a fear that we've grown so big that we can no longer functionally utilize contracts.
This, of course, isn't true. Several cities larger than Otsego do not have their own department. All of the agencies that we contract with are able to respond within the national guidelines for response times, equipment on scene, and staff. The residents are safe - as much as can be reasonably expected. In some rare cases, a resident will say that this isn't good enough and that our response times should be better than the national standard, no matter the cost. However, without the contracts you lose control over that factor: you can no longer agree to a level of service (of which, unfortunately, there isn't one today). Under a scheme of our own fire department the costs aren't measured in response times, they're measured in an annual budget. The costs will increase with little to no push-back. If we can agree that there should be a standard, then the contracts are our best option to see those standards are adhered to. If we cannot agree that a standard is appropriate, then the costs become infinite.
Ironically, the presentation pointed out this very contradiction. Previously, the Chief had said that no standard exists in another meeting.
“There is no response time standard for volunteer departments.”
Now the Chief is proposing that he be held to those apparently non-existent standards. A slide included in the presentation had the NFPA 1720 response time standards and the Chief said his goal will be to meet these. He further went on to say that the fire station will be within a 9 minute maximum response reflex time for 92% of the city.
This reflex time is an important metric to understand - and the Chief makes a fair point, here: the amount of time that a resident feels is the time from when they pick up the phone to make a call to the time that a fire truck is on scene. The NFPA standard is for response time which is when the fire department is dispatched to when they arrive on scene. They may seem like they should be the exact same amount of time, or extremely close - but since it isn't measured, we just don't know. The 2018 study estimated that the dispatch time may add as much as a minute to the response time. However, it's important to consider that the "reflex time" includes the amount of time that the caller is on the phone with a dispatcher while that dispatcher is trying to get information out of them to properly get emergency staff on scene. Callers that are panicked, provide incomplete information, or get disconnected, can easily increase the amount of time that a dispatch can occur. It's for this reason that fire departments are not held to the "reflex time" standard - because it includes a period of time that they aren't even aware of the emergency in order to act on it, and there's nothing that a department can do to improve it. It's a helpful measure for decision-makers to understand, but it's not a reasonable performance metric for a fire department.
The presentation included a slide that showed that the future station will be able to cover 92% of the city within 9 minutes. What was not shown is that this is easily accomplished today. All we're doing is trading one portion of the city for another. The primary reason for this is because the stations for our contract agencies are all very close to the border. What this underscores for me is how much a Joint Powers Agreement would have been better for Otsego residents. Unfortunately, the Council at the time abandoned the pursuit of that contract for reasons that are still not clear.
A current 9 minute response time from the contracted agencies looks like this:
The Chief presented a slide that looked similar to this for 9 minute response times from the new station:
That's what $4MM a year gets you. That's all it comes down to. The proposal is for a volunteer fire department, with full time staff. This means that the standard for the Otsego Fire and Emergency Services department will be exactly the same as the one our existing contracts are able to maintain: NFPA 1720. However, to be clear, the existing contracts do not contain any language about performance standards, which is a problem that has a rather simple remedy, in my opinion.
As one resident pointed out: the only tangible metric the Chief is proposing that he be held accountable to is the response time. Improving wellness of the community, expanding public education, increasing awareness... these are all very squishy goals. They sound good in a sales pitch, but it's a lot of money to pay for something that has no benefit that can be measured.
It's not going to get any cheaper
The second most common argument I hear that is made to support the creation of a municipal fire department is that the costs will not get any cheaper. You may have heard the same argument made supporting the building of a new city hall. This argument is also specious, and it takes advantage of people's fear over rising inflation. Yes, everything will cost more in the future... in 2024 dollars. That's how inflation works. For the record, I am against inflation. However, this argument often fails to consider that it's not just the cost of building a station (or a city hall) that increase over time, it's also the maintenance and increasing operating costs that also go up once you buy it - while the value of those things rapidly declines. You've undoubtedly heard the expression that a car's value goes down the second you drive it off the lot? The same is even more true for fire trucks. Just because something will be "more expensive" in the future doesn't mean it's a good investment today.
The contracts allow us to provide a higher quality of service at a price point that is cost-efficient for the taxpayer. Creating our own department is a risky, unneeded venture that wastes taxpayer resources.
Heritage Preservation Commission Meeting
The Heritage Preservation Commission met on Thursday this week to go over several items. Perhaps the most significant item was that the Commission was forced to move out of the office they had at Prairie Center and pack up all the historic artifacts, books, and digital media and put it into storage. While the Commissioners didn't complain about this move and took it as an opportunity to catalog items and information - making the best of the situation - to me it represents where the city prioritizes its heritage: which is not at all.
Next Week
Planning Commission Meeting Canceled
There will be no Planning Commission Meeting on Monday due to a lack of agenda items. The next meeting is planned for April 1st.
Parks and Recreation Commission Meeting
The Parks and Recreation Commission will meet on Tuesday at 7pm at Prairie Center. During the meeting, the Commissioners will receive an update on the Carrick's Landing Park Plan, and also receive a presentation on a natural conservation plan for Davis Farm Park. The plan was developed by the Friends of the Mississippi River.