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

OFFICIAL MEETING MINUTES SOUTH AREA FIRE & EMERGENCY RESPONSE DISTRICT Board of Directors Meeting Wednesday, February 22, 2023 @ 17:30 A. Call to Order The meeting of the South Area Fire & Emergency Response District Board of Directors was called to order at 17:31 by SAFER Chairman Mark Maloney. Members Present Board of Directors – Cronin, Langenhahn (via Zoom), Maloney, Opall (via Zoom) and Schaefer were all present. Also present: Town of Rib Mountain – Administrator Rhoden (via Zoom) and Finance Director Dunbar (via Zoom); SAFER – Fire Chief Finke, Deputy Fire Chief Lang 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 December 13, 2022, and approval of expenditures and receipts from December 2022 and January 2023. Motioned by Cronin to approve prior meeting minutes from December 13, 2022, and expenditures and receipts from December 2022 and January 2023. Second by Schaefer. Motion carried 5:0. D. Business Items Discussion and possible action on Investment Policy. - Chief Finke said we had some funds that we discussed doing some investments on. We sold the ladder truck for $350,000.00 and that money is going to be used for the purchase of an ambulance which is roughly 18 to 24 months away yet. We talked about taking the $350,000.00 and whether we put it into a CD or whatever we do with it to earn some interest on it while we’re waiting on the ambulance to come. We felt that we needed a policy for that. The policy that is in your packet is from the Town and I did some modifications to it and Dunbar sent an email because she had some concerns with a couple things. - Dunbar said as Chief Finke mentioned this is similar to what the Town has. One suggestion I had is in the Collateralization section in the first paragraph the Town is still listed there and it should be changed to District. The second issue that Trautman and I talked about and have an issue together is the Finance Directors are listed in this policy as the second authority and we feel the authority should be the Chief and the Deputy Chief. As Fiscal Agents we don’t make these investment decisions, we handle the books and we don’t feel comfortable being in that position in making those decisions. We can definitely help answer questions on behalf of the Chief and Deputy Chief, so we request that Finance Directors be changed to Deputy Fire Chief. - Chief Finke said from my standpoint, I don’t feel comfortable because Deputy Chief Lang and I are not CPAs. The one paragraph talks about that I would then be responsible that we’re not going to lose any money and that it’s invested appropriately. I’m not an investor, I don’t invest my own money and I’m certainly not going to invest the tax payers money. I wouldn’t feel comfortable investing $350,000.00 and I do something wrong and our $350,000.00 turns into $200,000.00 and I’m on the hook for losing $150,000.00 of the District’s money. - Dunbar said your policy does not allow high risk. - Schaefer said we have to do safe, guaranteed. - Dunbar said I’m looking at section 2, number 3 Delegation of Authority. - Schaefer said what if we changed entrusted to the Fire Chief, Deputy Fire Chief with the advice of the Finance Directors? - Dunbar said yes, we can be there for advice. - Deputy Chief Lang said should it read Fire Chief and Deputy Fire Chief with Fiscal Agent oversight? - Schaefer said you’re going to go Ehlers and Associates and they have a municipal program for investing money. - Maloney asked is there a fee with Ehlers? - Schaefer said yes, there is a fee with Ehlers and the fee Dunbar for us is. - Dunbar said the fee is very minimal about $50.00 a month or maybe $200.00. - Schaefer said what they’re charging us is minuscule. You could probably get better if Chief Finke ran around looking for CD rates and investing in banks, but that’s not his job, we want him to put out fires and save people. When you go to a group like that and they charge very little. Once we pass this, I think that’s your first stop. Call them, get the name from Dunbar. - Deputy Chief Lang said all the areas that say Chief and Finance Directors would change to Fire Chief and Deputy Fire Chief with Fiscal Agent oversight. - Maloney said with involvement of the Finance Directors too, right? - Deputy Chief Lang said I’m calling the Finance Directors our Fiscal Agents. Action: Motioned by Schaefer to approve the Investment Policy subject to the changes as explained by the Deputy Fire Chief. Second by Cronin. Motion carried 5:0. Discussion on Fire Department Training Facilities. - Chief Finke said as explained in here, this is something that we’ve talked about internally since about 2019 through our training committee. This is the thought of using used/old storage containers for fire department training facilities which is done frequently across the country. It’s not just for fire departments, but police departments and military are using them. I had sent an email to Higgins at the Village because the thought was to have it at this station next to the splash tower. It was taken to the Plan Commission. - Cronin said there was a lot of discussion on the look and the other concern was whether there would be burning in it. - Chief Finke said there would be no burning, I don’t have any plans to do that. I don’t want to take on that liability, there are burn facilities that have heat sensors and special plating in the walls to absorb the heat. This structure would not have that, those structures are extremely expensive and maintenance intensive. - Deputy Chief Lang said the NFPA is very specific on all the data you need to collect while burning in the burn building. When you’re burning a house, that’s different, but when you have a manufactured structure for burning in, it’s very strict what conditions you have to have in that building. Last year we bought a really nice smoke machine and we’ve used it at some houses for training and that is more than adequate for our needs for simulated fire. Right now we’re averaging two houses a year for training burns and they come when they come. The nice thing about the facilities is we can decide when to train, we can schedule training for the crew and especially our academies, it’s almost essential for training for our academy. - Maloney said without burning, what do you train? - Chief Finke said we’ll smoke it up and we’ll simulate everything in a fire with the exception of the heat, it’s a very low visibility environment so we can do search and rescue training, large area search, firefighter down rescue training. If it’s a two story building you can do technical rescue training off of the roof and it’s easy to put anchor points into those. Over time our plan is to cut a hole in the top and we can build confined space rescue training. It’s very versatile and I sent an email to Police Chief Schultz and asked him if the PD could use it. - Maloney said how is this all divided up and who gets what on this property? There’s a garage out there, there’s a structure out there. There’s a tower structure by the cell tower, do you use it? - Chief Finke said once a year. - Deputy Chief Lang said if you look at the property, we don’t own the tower, the NTC does, but we have the tower and a semi-trailer that we own and use for storage. Everything else is the PD’s. - Cronin said as far as the Plan (Commission), the heartache was number one, the aesthetics of it and the other concern was the burning, which obviously we haven’t had a meeting since Chief Finke and I exchanged some emails. When you say fire academy, is that only our employees? - Chief Finke said that’s our new employees. - Cronin said correct me if I’m wrong, but for a period of time we were holding classes, was it just EMT classes? - Chief Finke said just EMS classes, we don’t do fire classes. - Cronin said the thing that came up too and this is where that conversation went about the other splash tower, is who is going to take care of it and how much is that going to cost? - Chief Finke said maintenance should be very minimal and you might need to paint it every 15 years and they’re only steel boxes. - Deputy Chief Lang said the ones in Stratford have been there for probably 10 years and they look the same as they did when they put them in, and they burn in those. - Schaefer said I assume you’ll use a cement slab and put this down on it. - Chief Finke said I don’t know if we’d do cement or not. - Schaefer said or just a gravel pad. - Cronin asked how many times a year are you going to use it? - Deputy Chief Lang said we would train in it at least monthly each shift. - Cronin said the other issue and I don’t think the zoning code allows it. We’re going to have to do some sort of change. - Maloney said yes, they have to be painted every 10 to 15 years, but who’s painting them, who’s buying these? - Chief Finke said we would. - Cronin said my only concern, the splash towers for example. I think three of them in the Wausau area is kind of overkill. - Maloney said what is a splash tower? - Chief Finke said it’s back here by the fire hydrant. - Deputy Chief Lang said it’s made of wood, two stories and a roof. - Maloney asked and gets used how often a year? - Chief Finke said it doesn’t get used all that much, maybe 5 or 6 times a year. - Schaefer said when the NTC was doing that they said they were paying for them, but they haven’t maintained them. The difference with this is, this is what we want, this is something we’re going to own, this is something we’re going to maintain. - Cronin said that was the point with my concern, I didn’t want it to be something that we put together and then 10 years down the road it’s not getting used enough, it’s not being maintained and then we’re in the same situation we are in now. - Chief Finke said I see it being used for search and rescue. We don’t have a good place to do it. - Deputy Chief Lang said we do that in the apparatus bay or a back hallway and it’s not ideal. These we can smoke up and send people in. - Chief Finke said we used to send people up here, but since the remodel happened, I said I didn’t want guys up here in turnout gear and axes crawling around the hallways up there. So, we stopped doing that. Now it’s in the apparatus bay. We would buy used containers for around $3,000.00 – $4,000.00 each and my thought was to get three, but if we do two and add a third one later on. There would be some build out work that would have to be done inside of it and we have guys that know how to build. - Deputy Chief Lang said with something like this, because we are utilizing the tower by the water treatment and we’re using that for confined space and it’s not the safest. Confined space is one of the essential functions and services that we offer. - Chief Finke said I think this needs to go back to the Plan Commission and I can come to that meeting. - Maloney said this can be a place holder for the next agenda. End of Year 2022 Budget review. - Chief Finke said this is in your packet and either myself or Dunbar can answer questions. The audit I believe is close to being done.  - Schaefer said we had an extra $702,000.00 worth of revenue which comes from ambulance fees and ARPA money. Then we over spent our budget by $208,000.00. - Chief Finke said a chunk of that is from the bonus pay for part of the overage. When I went through this the big expenditures were the bonus, WRS and fuel. - Schaefer said you’re going to go over when you’re pulling in all the ambulance fees. - Chief Finke said the outside contracted services line 290 was almost $50,000.00 over and that’s the billing company. Attorney Referral. - None End of Month Budget review. - Chief Finke said this is in here as well and you’ll notice some of those lines, I know we go through this every year with some of the insurance items and software items are paid for at the beginning of the year for the entire year. Deputy Chief Lang is working on our station phone bills, which have gotten out of control. Action: Motioned by Cronin to approve the End of Month Budget. Second by Schaefer. Motion carried 5:0. E. Staff Reports Report from Fire Chief - Fire Chief Finke said we had a resignation of a Battalion Chief on February 10th. Because we’re tight on staffing, Deputy Chief Lang and myself worked quickly to get that position reposted. We have one internal and one external who’ve applied. - We hired 10 part time personnel, 7 for fire and EMS and 3 for interfacility transport only. - Our staffing has been a bit of a struggle this year, our minimum staffing is six which we’re at about half the time, our maximum staffing is eight when we have the 12-hour person which we’re at 20% of the time right now, it’s not ideal. Deputy Chief Lang and myself are still covering the ambulance a far amount and we have EMS Division Chief Bechel out doing fire inspections once a week because Fire Marshal Christiansen can’t keep up with inspections. The first part of this year has been spread a little bit thin, but we’re making it work. - I will be out of town probably starting tomorrow night, I will be in Madison for training on Friday and Saturday for a National Fire Academy course for new Fire Chiefs. - Myself, Deputy Chief Lang and Wausau Fire Chief Barteck were talking and one of the things I’ve wanted to do for a long time is having all of our ambulances both here and at Wausau and potentially at Riverside would have AVLS in them (Automatic Vehicle Locators) and the purpose of that would be the barriers of the municipality lines would be down for EMS calls. For example, I live in the City of Wausau, but 5 minutes away from this station and if Med 1 and Med 3 in Wausau are out, I’m waiting for Med 2 to come which is going to take 20 minutes to get to my house, but the ambulance from here can be there in 5 minutes. Ours and Wausau’s ambulances are intermingling all the time during the day, so when dispatch pages a call, they would page the closest ambulance. Realistically we’re still going to respond to 90-95% of our own calls and so is Wausau. Report from Deputy Fire Chief - Deputy Fire Chief Lang said the report is in your packet and I’ll give you the highlights. - Personnel report: There were no personnel highlights for December. In January we hired Captain Novak and comes to us from Stevens Point Fire, he was a career firefighter there for 16 years. Of those 16 years he spent the last 10 years as an Engineer. In February Battalion Chief John Lauer resigned, he started with Rib Mountain Fire full time around 2009. - EMS & Fire Incidents: The January fire response and the spike on EMS response on the graph, that is due to a change in the deployment. The way that we’re deploying now is we’re deploying our Rescue on EMS calls more than we ever have before. We’re trying to assure we have a fire truck staffed 24/7, because of that, every time the Rescue is deployed on an EMS call it generates a run and report and that’s why that number is up.  - Training: Hours were really good for training especially in January with 600 hours of training. The crews are really making an effort to train really hard especially on technical rescue. The EMS hours are down and we brought online a new training program using FoamFrat. Our EMS training was inconsistent, so we’re trying to add some consistency to that and we think this will do that. In January we started doing an inhouse officer development program, and we’re doing that for retention, for secession planning and to save money on the budget. The Engineers have been identified to be in an acting role, so we’re running them through that program, though they have to meet State Statute requirement and have Officer 1. The program will be completed next Wednesday and four of the six Engineers will be able to do a step up acting role. If an officer is off, then that Engineer will step up into that officer position and run shift and that will save us on overtime and having to force in people. - Apparatus: Truck 21 was sold which will be paying for the new ambulance which will offset the capital funds. - Fire Prevention/Public Education: That is listed. - Grants/Projects: The AFG (Assistance to Firefighters Grant) we put in for almost $600,000.00 grant for a radio package that will replace all of our radios. The reason we did that is because all of our radios right now are VHF band, and we want a dual band radio VHF and UHF. The problem we have right now with VHF is that it won’t penetrate especially the hospital. We have a real communication issue with commercial properties with the VHF band. 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 14, 2023, at 17:30 at SAFER Station 1. - Cronin has nothing. - Langenhahn has nothing. - Opall has nothing. - Schaefer said we need to think about working with Riverside, Kronenwetter and Wausau. - Maloney has nothing. G. Adjourn Motion by Schaefer to adjourn. Second by Cronin. Motion carried 5:0. Maloney adjourned at 18:55