S.A.F.E.R. Board of Directors

REVISED OFFICIAL MEETING MINUTES SOUTH AREA FIRE & EMERGENCY RESPONSE DISTRICT Board of Directors Meeting Tuesday, February 9, 2021 @ 18:00 A. Call to Order The meeting of the South Area Fire and Emergency Response District Board of Directors was called to order at 18:02 by SAFER Chairman Al Opall. Members Present Board of Directors – Langenhahn, Maloney, Opall, Schaefer and White were all present. Also present: Town of Rib Mountain – Administrator Rhoden; Village of Weston – Administrator Donner (via web meeting), Director of Finance Trautman; SAFER – Fire Chief Savage, Deputy Fire Chief Finke and Administrative Assistant Latimer. There were 2 guests. B. Correspondence/Comments from the public on issues related to the SAFER District None C. Consent Items Board of Directors approval of prior meeting minutes from January 12, 2021. Motioned by Langenhahn to approve prior meeting minutes from January 12, 2021. Second by Maloney. Motion carried unanimously. Board of Directors approval of vouchers from December 2020. Motioned by Maloney to approve vouchers from December 2020. Second by Schaefer. Motion carried unanimously. D. Business Items Presentation of the Annual Report. - Deputy Chief Finke said I sent all Board members this in an email this afternoon. Some of the highlighted topics are: • Training, total of 3633.5+ hours • Fire Response, 265 calls • Fire Inspections • EMS Response • EMS Volume by Municipality • EMS Call Volume, total of 3114 • Total Call Volume, total of 3379 • Fire Inspection Activities, total of 1203 inspections • Annual Training Hours • Fleet Information, average age of fire apparatus: 9 years, average age of ambulances: 7 years, average age of support vehicles: 7.6 years • Public Relations • Employee Health and Safety • Staffing. Discussion on Effects of Minimum Wage on SAFER. - Chief Savage said I started putting a briefer together for this and it changed every day, I still don’t know exactly where it sits other than from what I understand it’s not in the budget reconciliation that was just signed. We thought it would be prudent to bring this up because obviously we pay our Part-Time employees minimum wage over third shift. If this were to be signed and executed anywhere from 10 days to 4 years to initiate. If and when it does, we have some very difficult decisions to make. - Schaefer said I know that Fire Fighters do have an exemption for overtime and minimum wage. - Chief Savage said yes, the overtime is based on a 56-hour work week. That is what the Full-Time employees are based on. - Deputy Chief Finke said anything over 212 hours in a 28-day cycle is time and a half. - Chief Savage said I know the State Chief’s Association is working on something and when I hear more on that I will pass it along. Discussion and action to the Second Amendment of the Charter. - Chief Savage said I can start with some of the few items I came up with looking through this. Some of the items in this Charter I guess we’re not following to the “T”. • 9. f), we handle that internally and the Board can read the policy manuals and I would welcome your input. This is not something historically that the Board has done. • 9. h), Deputy Chief Finke and myself handle this on an annual basis, based off of employee reviews and performance evaluations. • 9. i), we don’t have a uniform fee for fire inspections. This has been widely debated across Fire Departments in the state. • 9. n), I handle this every year with our insurance carriers. • 9. p), I don’t think we have ever done that. These are some items that we are not doing by Charter. If that’s something we want to put in there for the Board to take on, we surely can. Otherwise, we can make the Charter read the way we are operating now. All the lines Mr. White went through and amended I thought was fantastic. - Maloney said staying on page 4, number 10., the last line. What we just did really didn’t follow this procedure with the two ambulances. It’s not anything for the Board, it’s to protect both of you (referring to Chief Savage and Deputy Chief Finke) and the District. - Chief Savage said we did talk about the ambulances and they were both electronically mailed to us, we should’ve put it in the bid spec to send it in a sealed envelope. We did do that with RFP for Attorney. - Maloney noted a couple typing errors. - White said all through the process I have listen to the comments from the Board of Directors about things that should be changed and things they would like to see different. So, I took it upon myself to do that with some minor tweaking here and there. One of the items that comes up first is about doing the evaluation of the Chief, it seemed to be a contentious issue in the past and the Board of Directors should do that. - Maloney said let’s turn to page 3, number 6., you’re saying two thirds which is three, not four members for the affirmative vote. - Opall said I would take that even further, the majority of a quorum. - Schaefer said I would leave number 6 as an exception, two thirds of all Board members. I think we should add a call-in session, it covers ourselves. Then we will need sub a, sub i, sub ii. Then b, sub i,. The previous one on page 2, I’m going back and forth if we want to roll it into two consecutive terms and that was the debate if we wanted to mix it up so that we have other people coming in, potentially representative of other Districts that are represented. - Maloney said this is on here because of me and I still feel bad on some of my word choices that I choose. I would have no issue and I don’t know how we would write this in here, to allow the fifth member to fill however many terms he/she wants. Langenhahn started here and he was in the beginning, I stand corrected and I will say it again, I’ll apologize for some of my words. Until Langenhahn decides that he’s done, then we can decide on two consecutive or three or four. - White said it’s just easy to leave that out. - Maloney said then leave that process out and when the time comes that we want to add that. - Schaefer said page 4 number 10, the bid process will need to be sealed and we open them up.  - Opall asked if Chief Savage, Deputy Chief Finke or Administrative Assistant Latimer would give us a heads up when elections are coming up. - Schaefer said we need to find Exhibit A. - Chief Savage said he will have a couple changes on page 7 as far as personnel and titles as some of those have changed. - White said that is another reason why we should bring it back to us first. I don’t foresee a really big hurry to do this. It’s maybe really good practice to look at this every 5 years or so. Action: No action taken. Discussion and action on Printed Signatures on Accounts Payable Checks. - Administrative Assistant Latimer said currently our process is we stamp each check with Mr. Opall, Chief Savage and Deputy Chief Finke’s signatures which can take up to 30 minutes or longer depending on how many checks. Proposed process is to have the Chairman, Chief and Deputy Chief sign and upload to the accounting software to print onto the checks. - Schaefer said the idea of signing a check is it’s the final check, but no one is doing it now and you’re just stamping them. - Maloney asked who is authorizing the checks? - Chief Savage said we are, Deputy Chief Finke and myself. - Maloney said so that’s the one process and you need both processes to be separate. - Chief Savage said the way the process happens is, we get the bill, Deputy Chief Finke or myself stamp, code it to the budget and initial the bill. Then the bill goes to Latimer and she enters it into the accounting system, prints the checks and then physically stamps each signature on each check. - Trautman said the purpose of the signature stamps is internal control. Since Latimer is doing everything, it would make more sense to have the digital signature. It is controlled so no one can go in and print off checks with the signature, so there is a safety feature there. - Chief Savage said the signatures get printed on as the checks are produced. Action: Motioned by Maloney to approve Printed Signatures on Accounts Payable Checks with the procedure talked about. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried unanimously. Attorney Referral. None Year to Date Budget review. - Chief Savage said we’re kind of in this whole process of trying to get everything into the new format, so there isn’t a printed one. There aren’t any large items in the budget right now. Capital items have been coming along, the alerting program and equipment have been installed at Station 2 and we’re waiting to get hooked up to CAD through dispatch. The two ambulances are ordered from the prior meeting. Once we get the bugs figured out on how to physically print out the new budget format, I’ll get them out to the Board to look at right away. - Schaefer asked what was our January deposit for ambulance? - Deputy Chief Finke said $88,193.34. E. Staff Reports Report from Fire Chief - Chief Savage said we had a fire knock down this morning at a large CBRF in the Village of Weston. Sprinkler activation came in as a fire alarm, limited crew due to Station 1 already being out on an ambulance call. The fire was held by a single sprinkler head in contained to the room of origin. We didn’t have to evacuate anyone which is a big thing with the cold right now. - The ski hill has had about 65 calls for the season. With the cold it is not that active right now. - We have not had very many Covid calls lately. It seems to really have gone down to none. We have about 80% of our staff that has been inoculated. We have not had a member that has contracted Covid from a patient on an ambulance.  Report from Deputy Fire Chief - Deputy Chief Finke said I don’t think I have anything. F. Remarks from the Board of Directors to set the next meeting date as well as discuss items for the next meeting agenda. - Next meeting scheduled Tuesday, March 9, 2021 at 18:00 at Rib Mountain Town Hall. - Chief Savage said he will not be present for the meeting on March 9th. - Langenhahn has nothing. - Maloney has nothing. - Schaefer said a comment about the fire department I started at is they are giving out the vaccines now. Is that something you think you are wanting to do? • Chief Savage said initially when this all started, that was talked about at the county level. The issue is logistically the time frame of taking it out of the frozen storage to physically mixing it up all has to be in a specific time frame. It doesn’t make sense right now, there is no way that we can store it. - White has nothing. - Opall has nothing. G. Adjourn Motion by Maloney to adjourn. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried unanimously. Opall adjourned at 19:21