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

OFFICIAL MEETING MINUTES SOUTH AREA FIRE & EMERGENCY RESPONSE DISTRICT Board of Directors Meeting Tuesday, March 14, 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, Maloney, Opall and Schaefer were all present, Langenhahn was absent and excused. Also present: Town of Rib Mountain – Administrator Rhoden, Finance Director Dunbar (via Zoom) and Community Development Director Grande (via Zoom); Village of Weston – Director of Finance Trautman (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 February 22, 2023, and approval of expenditures and receipts from February 2023. Motioned by Schaefer to approve prior meeting minutes from February 22, 2023, and expenditures and receipts from February 2023. Second by Cronin. Motion carried 4:0. D. Business Items Presentation of the Annual Report. - Deputy Chief Lang said in front of you is the annual report and we changed the format a little bit this year. I’ll bring your attention to page 26 staffing report, the third paragraph and we audited last year and found that we were only fully staffed about 53% of the time. We’ve talked about staffing and how difficult it has been in the last couple of years and you can see that with the downward trend especially from 2017. It doesn’t look like a big trend on the graph, but it is 20 personnel between 2017 and 2022 difference. Right now, our staffing is at 7 and we’re at 8 for 12 hours a day, and we looked at first quarter for this year and we’re at 8 about 20% of the time and then we’re at 7 about 30% of the time and that includes that 20%, we’re still at minimum about 50% of the time. Which at 6, we’d like to get our minimum higher than 6, with NFPA 1720, we’re supposed to have 10 firefighters on a fire scene within 10 minutes, and right now we achieve that about 30% of the time and we’re supposed to achieve that 80% of the time. On page 28, one of the things the Chief and I had said a year ago when we were put into our positions, we really wanted to work on our culture and employee morale. One of the things that we did that goes to that, this year we had an awards banquet and this was the first one, and we gave out three awards a Leadership Award, Firefighter Service Commendation and a EMS Service Commendation. - Schaefer asked on staffing, what do you have in the works for new people coming up? We lost a Battalion Chief and then you internally promoted, so you have a Captains job open. - Deputy Chief Lang said the Captains job has been posted and we spent some money on advertising this time, around $500.00. We’re about halfway through the posting and right now we have two candidates who are both internal. As far as the remainder of the staffing, we just started a training academy and we have 6  candidates for part time positions. One of the things we just did is, the Engineers who qualify with Fire Officer I, finished an internal class and they’ll be able to be in an acting roll when an officer is off. Another thing in the report is we’ve given more administrative responsibility to our Battalion Chiefs, so you’ll notice in the table of contents each Battalion Chief has a responsibility within the annual report. Discussion and possible action on Investment Policy. - Chief Finke said we brought this back from the last meeting and there was some further discussion between myself, Finance Director Dunbar and Director of Finance Trautman about some of the wording that was in there. We met again last week and we came up with a much more simplified policy that I do have one minor adjustment. The only thing that would get changed is where it says FDIC insurance, it would change to FDIC/NCUA because credit unions fall under NCUA and not FDIC. - Schaefer said but it limits it to non-negotiable CD or money market. - Dunbar said we added money markets because LGIP runs kind of like a money market and that gives you a $400,000.00 and that’s paying out at 4-4.5% right now. - Schaefer said not that they’re going to have a lot, that would per close using Ehlers to take your money and put it in municipal bonds. - Dunbar said we talked about how their large balance right now is due to us giving proceeds for the fire truck in advance, so once it’s paid, that balance is going to drop substantially and it’s good to have the availability of that cash that way. - Opall said Trautman and Dunbar, are both of you satisfied with what we have here? - Dunbar said we both reviewed it and I believe we’re both good. - Trautman said I’m happy with the way the policy was reworded. Action: Motioned by Schaefer to approve the Investment Policy with the addition of a slash and the letters /NCUA after FDIC. Second by Opall. Motion carried 4:0. Attorney Referral. - None End of Month Budget review. - Chief Finke said the up-to-date budget is in there, if anyone has any questions. - Schaefer said this is through two months ending in February, if you take $173,000.00 and divide by 2 and multiply by 12 you’re $300,000.00 lower than you budgeted. - Chief Finke said for revenue? - Schaefer said yes. - Chief Finke said that’s not accurate, we’re ahead of budget and I have that on my board in my office and we’re about $42,000.00 ahead of budget. - Trautman said the deposit that was sent in January was accrued to 2022, and that’s why it’s not reflected in the budget status report. - Schaefer said so you accrued it back to 2022, so we’re really only at $173,313.00 - Trautman said yes, for one month that came in in February. They bill the fees in January and then gets deposited into our account in February. - Deputy Chief Lang said one of the things that will help with that total, we were just on a phone call today and there was a bill passed on February 1st, they increased Medicare reimbursement by 8.7% and that’s about 50% of our run volume. - Chief Finke said we figured that’s an extra $50,000.00 - $60,000.00 thought the year. E. Staff Reports Report from Fire Chief - Fire Chief Finke said I took a National Fire Academy class for new Fire Chief’s, there was budgeting items that we went through and we spent almost one full day of items that make you consider legally if you want to keep your job. It was a good class and everybody mingled together really well. - Deputy Chief Lang and I are going to Madison tomorrow, it’s the Fire/EMS Lobby Day that multiple groups put together. We meet with the lobbying groups in the morning and then in the afternoon we go meet with  our elected officials from our area. The push for tomorrow and they prep us for a couple hours so we all send the same message on shared revenue. - The burn structure we talked about last meeting, I met with the Plan Commission last night in the Village which was approved and will go to their full Village Board on Monday night. I will probably bring that back to a later agenda here to discuss a little bit more on details. o Cronin said just based off some of the commentary last night, I think we should probably push it to the back. - Normally we don’t do this mid-year, we’re going to switch software systems. The biggest issue we’re having is Fire Marshal Christiansen’s struggle with the software that we currently use for Fire Inspections, it works great for EMS reporting and it works ok for fire reporting, but for inspections it’s awful and we’ve tried for 18 months. It’s glitchy, he’ll enter something in and he’ll go back tomorrow to try and pull it up and it’s gone. The one that we’re purchasing was recommended to us by LifeQuest our billing company, Deputy Chief Lang did some research online through some of the discussion forums that he is on and we demoed it three times. This does have everything we want it to do in all the different disciplines and we’ve looked into it very in- depth and all of our demos have been several of hours long. o Deputy Chief Lang said one of the things we made a priority is whatever software we have, we want inclusive software, so we have one program. We talked with the City of Wausau and they’re using six different software programs. It’s going to do somethings that we’ve asked ESO to do that they just can’t do. o Schaefer asked do you have an existing data that you have to backfill back into this? o Chief Finke said yes, and they have a program to do that. o Schaefer asked how much is this? o Chief Finke said $9,000.00 for this year and it’ll be $18,000.00 annually after that, which is about $1,800.00 less than what we’re paying now. It’ll interface with our CAD and our cardiac monitors and it’ll interface with the hospitals. - I had a meeting with the Fourth of July fireworks last week, the City of Wausau wants to do a community fireworks event and one of the areas they thought about lighting them off was at the top of Rib Mountain, which I said we’re not doing that because that would be a very unsafe idea. The plan right now is to light them off from the Wausau Airport, so we don’t have a whole lot to do with it as far as the fire district. o Rhoden said there will be viewing areas and Rib Mountain will have one or two at Bluegill and maybe Rookery and have food truck facilities. 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: Battalion Chief Lauer resigned from his position, we had two applicants, one was out of state and pulled his application and one internal candidate, Captain Meyers and he was promoted. We posted for his Captain position and right now we have two internal candidates. - We did interviews for part time positions and started Academy this last week and we have eight now, one IFT personnel resigned right away. - EMS & Fire Incidents: EMS and fire responses are up from a year ago and up from the five-year average. - Training: Right now, it says 209.5+ hours of EMS training, we’ve gone to an online format for EMS training. - Apparatus: No report - Fire Prevention/Public Education: That is listed. - Grants/Projects: That is listed. 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, April 11, 2023, at 17:30 at SAFER Station 2. - Cronin said I would like an agenda item for the next meeting on staffing. - Opall has nothing. - Schaefer said nice job on (Rib Mountain resident’s) house. - Maloney has nothing. G. Adjourn Motion by Opall to adjourn. Second by Cronin. Motion carried 4:0. Maloney adjourned at 18:31