Great Barrington — If it is to the meet the needs of a modern organization in a growing town, the Great Barrington Fire Department must add staff and increase its budget, according to a report on the department’s operations recently completed by a consultant.
Charles Jennings
, a principal at Manitou Inc. in Peekskill, N.Y., unveiled the study at Monday’s selectboard meeting. Click here to read the document. If you do, you’re in for a long night. It’s 130 pages long.
“They did a thorough job over the last five months,” Chief Charles Burger said of Manitou, which was hired by the selectboard this spring to conduct the study that cost a total of $19,445.
Jennings has a background in urban planning and in firefighting, both in risk analysis and as a volunteer. He said his company, which specializes in program evaluation, public safety, international development, urban planning, and organizational assessment and research, was founded in 1999.
“We’ve worked with one-station all-volunteer departments to major metropolitan departments in Houston, Washington, D.C., and Seattle,” Jennings told the board.
See video below of the presentation of the fire department report by Charles Jennings and the ensuing questions from the selectboard and members of the audience:
His findings on the department, which has two full-time employees — Burger and a fire inspector/firefighter position created last year — were largely positive. The rest, numbering about 25 firefighters, are pay-per-call members. The current membership, Jennings says, is dedicated and effective. Their effectiveness is especially remarkable given that the town faces “diverse risks over a large geography.” Burger does a commendable job of collecting and managing data.
Still, there are many challenges: heavy apparatus response times do not meet industry standards; membership is declining; the chief is “stretched thin with day-to-day service delivery and strategic management challenges.”
In addition, department spending is generally lower than its peers, even as demands on the department grow with new construction. Not all regulatory requirements are being met. Jennings noted that the number of noncompliances is not an “acute” problem, but “they represent an exposure for liability and missed opportunity for improvement.”
And while emergency medical services are provided effectively by the Southern Berkshire Volunteer Ambulance Squad, “collaborative delivery [of EMS services] is worthy of exploration,” the report says.
“For the Town of Great Barrington to establish its own emergency medical service (EMS) within the Fire Department, we estimate it would cost a bare minimum of approximately $843,000 in the first year and $574,000 in the following year, with a slight yearly increase thereafter to cover cost of living adjustments for personnel,” the report says.
Finally, the Housatonic fire station should be “spruced up.” In 2010, the Great Barrington Fire Department moved from its former quarters on Castle Street to a $9.1 million new fire station on State Road (routes 7 and 23). But the Housatonic station has remained largely unchanged since it opened more than 60 years ago.
The Housatonic firehouse, which opened in 1954, is a low-slung small brick edifice near the center of the village. It was built for just under $22,000 and had a small frame addition added in 1980, according to “Great Barrington: Great Town, Great History,” a book by noted local historian Bernard Drew, who also acted as the selectboard’s recording secretary at last night’s meeting.
A rickety-looking water tower looms over the firehouse. According to former Select Board Chairman Walter “Buddy” Atwood III, the tower was built by the mills to help the fire department maintain proper water pressure. The mills were full of organic material and could burn quickly — a fact of which the mill owners were acutely aware.
The Housatonic firehouse was built on a small sliver of land donated by Monument Mills. And there is virtually no room to expand. There was talk about five years ago of closing the Housatonic firehouse on the grounds that it was redundant, but the idea proved very unpopular in the village.
Among the recommendations Jennings made to the department are adding an additional career firefighter and adding an administrative assistant. The latter “will allow the chief to focus on high-level tasks.” When on-call members leave, Jennings recommended exit interviews be conducted.
The department also has a problem with a relatively high level of false alarm incidents (see chart below), which is cause for some concern. Some of the sources of false alarms are not surprising, given their size.
Leading the pack, for example, was Flag Rock Village, a low-income housing development of 18 family homes and 32 senior housing units operated by the Great Barrington Housing Authority.
Bard College at Simon’s Rock, the Travelodge motel, McDonald’s, Camp Eisner and Berkshire Meadows also made the list. But so did a single-family home at 29 Wyantenuck St., off North Plain Road. That property recorded 71 false alarm incidents from 2012 to 2017.
But Burger cautioned against reading too much into those statistics. “Some of the false alarms were actually medical calls,” he explained. Some in the room wonder if false alarms might be a factor in declining membership in the department.
“I can see why rushing out of your house in the middle of the night makes it less appealing,” observed Selectman Ed Abrahams. “Is there a quick fix for that?”
“You can look selectively at a steeper fine structure to provide incentives for people to maintain their systems,” said Jennings. He added that some of the culprits are “public-good” entities and so fining them might prove counterproductive.
For the cost estimates of implementing Manitou’s recommendations, which Jennings called “reasonable investments,” see the table below:
After questions had been asked and answered, Abrahams asked, “So what do we do to keep this from sitting in a file somewhere?”
After thanking Jennings for his report, Selectboard Chairman Steve Bannon replied: “One of the things this is driven by is the budget and I think a lot of these recommendations are budget driven.”
Bannon asked Burger to return in six to eight weeks “and give us an update on the things that are fixable without extra cost, or least that we can improve on — and I think that’s where we would go with that.”
Tabakin added that during last year’s budget process, there was spending proposed for an additional fire department position but that the decision was made to wait until Jennings report was complete.
“So I think after you’ve looked at this, there will have to be some sort of direction for us to determine whether your comfortable going ahead with that hiring based on an approved allocation at town meeting,” Tabakin said.
“That’s something we can put on an agenda in the very near future because if we’re going to do it, let’s do it now,” said Bannon.
