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

OFFICIAL MEETING MINUTES SOUTH AREA FIRE & EMERGENCY RESPONSE DISTRICT Board of Directors Meeting Thursday, November 10, 2022 @ 17:30 A. Call to Order The meeting of the South Area Fire & Emergency Response District Board of Directors was called to order at 17:32 by SAFER Chairman Mark Maloney. Members Present Board of Directors – Langenhahn, Maloney and Schaefer were all present, Cronin and Opall were absent and excused. Also present: Town of Rib Mountain – Finance Director Dunbar; SAFER – Fire Chief Finke, Deputy Fire Chief Lang, Lieutenant Zellner and Administrative Assistant Latimer. 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 September 26, 2022 and approval of expenditures and receipts from September and October 2022. Motioned by Schaefer to approve prior meeting minutes from September 26, 2022 and expenditures and receipts from September and October 2022. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 3:0. D. Business Items Discussion and possible action on approved 2023 Wage Scale. - Deputy Chief Lang said Schaefer asked me to bring back the charts because there was a discrepancy on the Engineer pay by about $800.00 per line and that has been fixed. - Schaefer said I do appreciate it all being laid out. - Maloney said the overall increase is what percentage? - Deputy Chief Lang said ballpark the wage increase throughout the entire department is 4-5%. Action: Motioned by Schaefer to approve the approved 2023 Wage Scale. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 3:0. Discussion and possible action on stipend in lieu of Health Insurance. - Chief Finke said I was going to ask the Board that we could table this at this point for this year. Health insurance paperwork is due right now and we don’t have time to do that for 2023. Action: No action taken. Discussion and possible action on 2023 Insurance Quotes. - Chief Finke said in the past we’ve never done this much work on getting insurance quotes, but this year we did for a couple of different reasons. First and foremost, insurance costs have gone up and secondly, I’m personally not a fan of our current company. I have the quotes listed and the quote you see from Spectrum of $88,943.00, that is with a higher deductible than the other two companies. All our property and casualty, workers comp, general liability and cyber insurance. - Schaefer asked would you like to go with Spectrum? - Chief Finke said I would like to go with Spectrum and I realized they’re not the cheapest bid, the cheap bid is our current company. Spectrum understands government very well and they have programs for us to reach out for HR, the other companies do also, but those programs just aren’t as good as Spectrum. We do get a healthy dividend from Spectrum. - Schaefer asked do you get a dividend from Community? - Chief Finke said there’s potentially dividend, but nobody guarantees dividends. Action: Motioned by Schaefer to go with Spectrum and LWMMI for Insurance. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 3:0. Review and possible action on Updated 2023 Fee Schedule. - Chief Finke said the copy of the current Fee Schedule is in the packet, I don’t have anything in particular that I want to change, but I wanted to bring it to the Board to see if you had any input on things you would like changed. - Schaefer asked where is the electrical car? - Chief Finke said I’m still waiting for the Town to do the ordinance. The Village did theirs. I can bring this back anytime to add that. We can add it now, but not enforce it till there’s an ordinance to enforce it. - Schaefer said I would add it now. - Deputy Chief Lang said the mileage is at $21.00, there was a typo on this and I don’t know why it says $19.00. Action: Motioned by Schaefer to approve the 2023 Fee Schedule with the change of $19.00 to $21.00 and to include a car fire at amount determined by the Chief which is $500.00. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 3:0. Discussion and possible action on Sale of Ladder Truck. - Chief Finke said we’ve been talking about this for a few months now and I brought it up at a couple Board meetings. We’ve taken a look at ISO and it will be a minimal deduction of half a point, but it won’t drop our rating. If we sell it now, the amount of money the people are willing to pay for it is inflated. - Schaefer said the problem is you have an unreliable vehicle. - Chief Finke said we do have backup options and the Village of Kronenwetter is buying a $1,400,000.00 110’ ladder truck and they’ll have it in January. - Schaefer said the question becomes, you guys need it, you call for it, will they even be able to get it here? - Chief Finke said our first option would be the City of Wausau. Our plan was to keep that truck for another couple of years until the new one comes, but I reached out to Kevin Pomasl the Pierce dealer who we bought the new truck from and asked him what’s it worth? He said $350,000.00 - $400,000.00 and I reached out to Brindlee Mountain Fire Apparatus who we worked with when we sold the rescue truck a couple years ago and they would do two different things, either broker it and advertise for us on their website and they charge 5% of whatever you sell it for or they made an offer to purchase it for $325,000.00. - Maloney asked can we give them a minimum and tell them $360,000.00 is the minimum? - Chief Finke said yes, we can. - Schaefer said we paid $560,000.00 for it and we donated it into SAFER, so we’re taking the great asset that we donated into this partnership and now we’re selling it. - Chief Finke said from selling fire apparatus, in my opinion it’s a good amount of money to get back on a 12- year-old truck and the truck is in very good condition. - Deputy Chief Lang said historically when you look at consolidation, the way the municipalities save money is on capital and the idea is for us to reduce the fleet and we already have. - Schaefer said the only thing I have in my mind is we don’t have the staff to operate two of them at once. - Maloney asked where is this money going to go again? - Chief Finke said I would like to use it to purchase an ambulance that we have in the CIP. - Schaefer said put it on the Surplus site with a minimum and see what happens. Action: No action taken. Discussion and possible action on change to Capital Asset Policy. - Finance Director Dunbar said the only thing we are updating here is their policy had a $1,000.00 minimum for an asset to be a fixed asset and it’s extremely low. $5,000.00 is what the Town and Village are at and we’re  asking to bump that to $5,000.00 at least in cost and have at least a one-year use for life in order to be a fixed asset. Action: Motioned by Schaefer to approve the change to Capital Asset Policy. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 3:0. Discussion and possible action on Reduction of Ambulance Bill. - Chief Finke said this patient owes us $98.22 and insurance paid all they were going to pay. The patient is on social security and according to the poverty guidelines from our billing company, the patient qualifies for 100% write off of their bill. - Schaefer asked what have we done with these in the past? - Maloney said I think there is a consistency here and word gets out that we are dabbling in a few of these. - Chief Finke said my thought was we work with the patient and pay $10.00 a month. I talked with Attorney VanderWaal and he said as long as you’re consistent. Can we come up with a policy in the future we can handle these without having to bring everyone of these to the Board? - Maloney said as long as you collect in some way, you can set up whatever you want. - Schaefer said and if you want to come to a write off where it’s like the ones we’ve had before with odd situations bring it to the Board. - Chief Finke said another patient went to the Town the other day, we have another patient that had requested an ambulance bill write off before and was denied and the patient was back again this week at the station and upset about the mileage and thinks they shouldn’t have to pay for mileage and they think the rate we charge for mileage is outrageous and thinks residents especially shouldn’t have to pay mileage. The patient wants that to come to a Board meeting and I told them we were having a meeting tonight, but they said they couldn’t make it tonight. Action: Motioned by Maloney to deny the reduction of the ambulance bill. Second by Langenhahn. Abstained by Schaefer. Motion carried 2:1. Attorney Referral. - None End of Month Budget review. - Chief Finke said if you look at the ambulance fees, I just got the deposit that will go in there for November was $119,000.00. We still have a lot out there, so it’s a rough estimate, but I’m thinking we’re going to be about $300,000.00 to $350,000.00 to the good between our expenditures and revenue at the end of the year. E. Staff Reports Report from Fire Chief - Fire Chief Finke said we had a fire on South Mountain Road two weekends ago, it was a little difficult with a house full of stuff and we could not safely make entry into the house. Nobody was living there and the fire started in the middle of the night. It was found by Public Works that was automatically dispatched to a power outage that was near this house and he smelled smoke and walked towards the house and the basement was glowing. Again, we couldn’t make entry but we did get the fire out. - We have an ambulance on the CIP schedule for 2024 and talking with our ambulance vendor that I ordered the chassis for the ambulance remount about a year ago because we knew there was delays in chassis already, the vendor told me earlier this week that best case scenario that ambulance will get re-chassis in January of 2024. That truck has 170,000 miles on it and it gets a lot of miles put on it from interfacilities. The vendor said if you ordered a brand-new ambulance today, a full ambulance, not a remount, the soonest you will see it is September of 2025. o Schaefer asked what’s the cost of it going to be now? o Chief Finke said about $325,000.00 to $350,000.00. Report from Deputy Fire Chief  - Deputy Fire Chief Lang said the September and October report is in your packet and I’ll give you the highlights. - Personnel report: We’re interviewing on Monday, 7 candidates. Two for Captain and seven for Engineer. - EMS & Fire Incidents: New template attached. - Training: We burnt down the house in Weston on Birch Street and that was a positive training burn that was in September. In October we started something new with spot-check training and between Chief Finke and myself we will show up at the station and give them a scenario, go do that. They do the scenario from beginning to end and we evaluate them. We received really good feedback from that. - Apparatus: We did a rust preventative on the trucks. - Fire Prevention/Public Education: That is listed. - Grants/Projects: We purchased the UTV with the Flex grant and is in service. The skid is ordered and we should get it next month. We received the DNR grant which is a 50/50 match grant. We purchased new hoods for everybody that are NFPA compliant particulate fire hoods. F. Business Items 18:29 Motion by Schaefer to move into closed session pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 19.85(1)(c) to considering employment, promotion, compensation or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility, to wit: 2022 annual review of the Fire Chief. Second by Langenhahn. Roll-call vote: NAME: Aye Nay Langenhahn X Schaefer X Maloney X Motion carried 3:0. 18:46 Motion by Schaefer to convene into open session. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 3:0. Discussion and possible action on closed session agenda item. Action: No action taken. G. 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, December 13, 2022 at 17:30 at SAFER Station 2. - Schaefer asked have we heard anything from the Village of Kronenwetter on how their service is with Riverside or any thoughts about that or from the new Chief? o Chief Finke said I do speak with the Assistant Chief. The new Chief talks to Deputy Chief Lang now. o Schaefer said my next question is any word at all from Marathon City? o Chief Finke said I haven’t heard a word. o Deputy Chief Lang said the issue we’re having is when we get car accidents, dispatch will page Marathon First Responders and the pagers go off and the fire department hears car accident and they’re self dispatching and have showed up to two car accidents in the Townish. - Langenhahn has nothing. - Maloney has nothing. H. Adjourn Motion by Schaefer to adjourn. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 3:0. Maloney adjourned at 19:04