Fire, EMS Services Complicated by Handshake Deals

(TNS) – [Easton, Conn.] is looking into next steps after a consultant hired to evaluate its fire and emergency medical services submitted a report and recommendations on how to improve them.

First Selectman David Bindelglass said the town hired Emergency Services Consulting International as officials and had been discussing doing so for years due to a number of issues.

“One of them is communications — particularly for the fire department — have become substandard over time,” he said. “They’ve managed to maintain them but it’s clear the town is going to have to invest in a fairly significant improvement in communications. Secondly, we had this long running issue of the north end, where there’s no public water supply, and insurance rates for homeowners, which were being influenced by concerns over how well the town could fight fires in the north end.”

Bindelglass noted the home insurance costs are 30 to 40 percent higher in the north part of town because they have an Insurance Services Office rating of several points more than the rest of town. He said the third area the town wanted the consultant to look at was the relationship between the fire and EMS departments, particularly finding a good spot to build a new headquarters for the latter, as its current facility is not in good condition and does not suit its needs.

“Their building is pretty much just plain falling down,” he said. “We have a building committee. They’ve been meeting for several months. They’ve narrowed it down to a list and we’re hoping that in the next month or two we will have our first choice and start working on it.”

With those drivers, Bindelglass said, the town hired the consultant to look for ways to address those problems but also reduce cost. A few weeks ago, he said, ESCI handed in a final report.

Bindelglass said they made recommendations that would improve the ISO rating in town, including improving communications and codifying mutual aid agreements with surrounding towns that had, up until this point, been more of a handshake type deal.

“They picked out some easy things they think will help (the ISO score) such as documenting the education that firefighters get,” he said. “The second thing is codifying mutual aid, because we probably can get water to a lot of these places quicker than we get credit for for two reasons. One is because we have mutual aid. Two is because we don’t really get credit for having full-time staff intermixed with our volunteer staff.”

Bindelglass said the town could also buy a water tanker truck for $600,000, but the consultant found that would not be cost-effective, as Redding and Monroe have a tanker truck close by.

“We just have to be able to guarantee that we can use their tanker truck,” he said. “We’ll make those agreements more formal. When the people who rated us come in, we can’t prove it.”

Sometimes consultants are needed to tell officials what they know already, Bindelglass said, and it adds force to the urgency and need for solutions.

“I hope that’s part of what will come of this,” he said.

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