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

OFFICIAL MEETING MINUTES SOUTH AREA FIRE & EMERGENCY RESPONSE DISTRICT Board of Directors Meeting Tuesday, April 11, 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 17:30 by SAFER Chairman Mark Maloney. Members Present Board of Directors – Cronin, Langenhahn (*arrived at 17:45), Maloney, Opall and Schaefer were all present. Also present: Town of Rib Mountain – Administrator Rhoden; Village of Weston – Director of Finance Trautman (via Zoom); SAFER – Fire Chief Finke, Deputy Fire Chief Lang, EMS Division Chief Bechel, Battalion Chief Genrich, Lieutenant Zellner (via Zoom), Engineer Breit (via Zoom), Engineer Riesterer (via Zoom), Firefighter Haas (via Zoom), Firefighter Kolb (via Zoom) 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 March 14, 2023, and approval of expenditures and receipts from March 2023. Motioned by Schaefer to approve prior meeting minutes from March 14, 2023, and expenditures and receipts from March 2023. Second by Opall. Motion carried 4:0. D. Business Items Presentation of the Audit. - Chief Finke said the Audit is in your packet and Trautman can go through it or if you have any specific questions. - Maloney asked can you do an overview? - Schaefer said what are the findings of the Audit, and is there anything concerning to you as a Financial Advisor to SAFER? - Trautman said the fund balance increased quite a bit and that’s a good sign. - Schaefer said it shows here that there was a finding. Not really a finding, more of a recommendation on page 74. - Trautman said that is a new GASB for next year, specifically Microsoft 365 and if you have that. For your firehouse if you have any software agreements, they need to be accounted for, separately especially as they cost a lot more money if you add auditors to it. Dunbar and I will work on it and see if we can get it together so it doesn’t add more Audit fees. With contracts for all computer programs, including our financial software, Microsoft 365 and any other software contracts that we have to do additional accounting procedures. - Schaefer said I’m confused by some of the numbers that they presented in the Audit. The first thing that they say is, in the supplementary area we have a budget variance positive of $493,812.00 and I get that. Then they go over to the year end and there’s a negative number on expenditures and I assume that’s where we spent an extra $208,000.00 over budget because we were running a lot, but we were taking in revenue to cover that. - Chief Finke said and part of that also a big amount of that was the bonuses we gave for Covid from the ARPA money. Also, another big amount was the overage in EMS billing costs because we had so much extra revenue. - Schaefer asked so what is our current undesignated fund balance? - Chief Finke said $493,812.00. - Schaefer asked where is last year? - Deputy Chief Lang said on page 33 net change is $493,812.00, fund balance at the beginning of the year was $735,265.00 for a general fund of $1,229,077.00. Then the Capital Equipment was $283,607.00 at the beginning of the year with a net change of $923,226.00 which is the ladder truck and the sale of the ambulance. So, we have $1,229,077.00 operating and $1,206,833.00 capital for a total of $2,435,910.00 - Schaefer said that is a very healthy balance. Discussion on Future Staffing. - Chief Finke said at the last meeting Cronin asked for a discussion on staffing and what we’re thinking for the future and put together some information for you that we can go through. I wanted to start out with where we are right now and so the Board has a firm grasp on where we are and some of the terminology we use. - Maloney said in the couple years past, I thought the part time was flexible and useable, but it’s also not the on-duty response all the time, right? Whatever you do at station 1 and station 2, is any of that made up with flex? - Chief Finke said yes, we rely on them to staff every day. We rely on 36 hours a day, 7 days a week of part time people. - Deputy Chief Lang said and we also rely on 2 non-full-time, what we call majority time people per day. - Schaefer asked who’s management and who’s not by the way for purposes of unionization. - Deputy Chief Lang said if we unionized, Battalion Chiefs and up would not be in the union. Captains and down would be in the union, I believe. It has to do with the number of stations you have and the number of levels of management. (*Langenhahn arrived) - Chief Finke said right now for full-time staff we have myself, Deputy Chief Lang, Fire Marshal Christiansen, EMS Division Chief Bechel, 3 Battalion Chiefs, one of which is Battalion Chief Genrich so there’s always a Battalion Chief working at this station, 3 Captains which always work at the station in Rib Mountain, 6 Engineer/Paramedics and there’s always one at each station and 7 Majority Time staff. Majority time work full-time hours, the only thing different about majority time then full-time staff is they do not get health insurance and they do not get full pay on third shift. We currently have 21 part time Firefighter/EMT and 9 part time Interfacility Transport staff. - Schaefer asked do those people say they don’t want to do 911 and only want to do this? - Chief Finke said the Interfacility staff a lot of them are nurses and then we have some that are older paramedics and a couple EMT. Next slide, right now, we are staffed with 7 a day and we have an 8th position open from 9am – 9pm our busiest time of the day. Then minimum staffing if we have people on vacation, we’ll drop down to 6. We never work with less than 6 on-duty, if we only have 5 on-duty because of people calling in sick and we’re short because of vacation, then people get ordered in, so they’re forced to come in to work or we literally don’t let people go home the next morning if it’s their day off. When we’re fully staffed, station 1 has a Captain, Engineer and a Paid-On-Call part time person and station 2 has the Battalion Chief, Engineer, 2 Majority Time employees and a Paid-On-Call part time person for the 12-hour shift. Battalion Chief and Captain have the management duties every day, the major difference is the Battalion Chiefs are in charge of a program, like Battalion Chief Genrich is in charge of training and has to organize training, document training, do training outlines and it’s very important that when we get audited for our 2% dues, we have to have outlines and records and they have to be very detailed, so those are things Battalion Chief Genrich has to do on top of his normal daily duties. Captains have some other duties they’re in charge of other than just running the shift, it is not as in-depth as the Battalion Chiefs. Engineer’s primary is running calls and most times they’re the primary paramedic on duty and they’re also responsible for helping with some maintenance on the vehicles and daily inspections. Part time firefighter/paramedics have daily inspections, running calls and cleaning. IFT staff, they only come in off duty, if a call comes in right now (for an IFT) Battalion Chief Genrich sends it out and if one of them calls and says they can do that, then they would come in. - Cronin asked do we pull anyone off shift for transfers? - Chief Finke said yes, we will drop down to 5. If there’s 7 people on duty, we can take a transfer right away, but then we’re only running with 5 people on. If we have 8 people, we still send it out, if two people that are off duty say yes and come in, we stay staffed at 8 and the two people off duty would take it. Lately we’ve been able to build up a very good group of Interfacility staff, they’re not covering all of the calls, but about 60-70% of the calls they are taking right now. Next slide, if we have 6 people on duty, which right now is about 50% of the time, we have 4 people at this station and 2 people at the other station which those 2 people have the responsibility to cover the ambulance, the engine, the ladder truck and the tender depending on what call comes in they have to be able to jump on one of those vehicles and if the ambulance is out those other vehicles are not covered. At this station, there’s a crew of 2 people on the first out ambulance, the second out ambulance is not staffed at all and Rescue 21 has 2 people on it. If an IFT comes in and we’re at 6, we have to get an off-duty person to come in, if we don’t get any off-duty people to come in, we have to turn it down. If we’re at 7 people, then we staff 4 here and 3 at the other station, so we have 2 people on the ambulance over there and 1 person can stay on the engine. Then we have 2 people on the ambulance over here and then we have 2 people for the rescue truck again and the second out ambulance is still not staffed. - Opall asked for IFT, what type of lead time. - Chief Finke said they vary greatly, sometimes they’ll call us and need an ambulance right now, or they’ll call tomorrow morning and say they need a transfer for Thursday. When we’re staffed at 8, we have 5 people here and 3 people over there and Med 11 has 2 people on it and the engine still only has 1 person on it. Then we can staff two ambulances out of here and have three total ambulances staffed and the rescue truck would only have 1 person on it, if both ambulances are out at the same time. People are floating between the trucks all the time, really no one is assigned to one vehicle. - Deputy Chief Lang said the rescue truck is an ALS Rescue, so we have medications and a defibrillator. - Maloney asked when we get a call on a transfer, are we first call, second call, third call or is it random? - Chief Finke said it varies. - Deputy Chief Lang said Aspirus will call MedEvac, if MedEvac is not available then we’ll get the call. Marshfield has a transport service, if they’re not available then we’ll get a call. - Chief Finke said if MedEvac has an ambulance in Wisconsin Rapids, and they have a cardiac patient down there that needs to quickly get to Marshfield or Wausau, and Aspirus is not available, they’ll call Wisconsin Rapids Fire. - Cronin asked if we’re at minimum staffing on a holiday and you can get one person to come for a transfer to Chicago or if we have a hard time getting people to come in do, we keep them here? - Deputy Chief Lang said we will drop to 5, one caveat is Chief Finke and I will come in and cover shifts for transfers. - Chief Finke said after our last Board meeting, I just got home and Battalion Chief Genrich sent out for a transfer and I called him and asked if anyone called in and he said no and I said I’ll come in quick and cover. - Schaefer asked there’s no such thing as roll up anymore, no one comes in anymore? - Chief Finke said we don’t have many people that live close anymore. - Schaefer said when we go through this, in the back of my mind is there an incentive to get roll up crew here? - Chief Finke said I think if you asked everybody, they’re going to say they’re not coming in. - Schaefer said do you incentivize it more? - Deputy Chief Lang said people’s incentive is time off. The incentive that we’ve given to attract people to SAFER is changing from a California shift to a 48/96. Now people work a 48-hour shift and then they’re gone for four days. - Chief Finke said the last two Captains we hired didn’t attempt to negotiate their wage, they did attempt to negotiate PTO. Next slide, structure fire response, and I’ve said this before and I feel like we always put our fire response on the back burner as we don’t think about it and we don’t talk about it a lot, but we have to make sure we can have a solid fire response. NPFA standards we should have 10 firefighters on scene within 10 minutes and we’re between 7-9 firefighters. We do have an auto-aid agreement with Mosinee (Fire District) and they respond with an ambulance which is a backup for our firefighters if anything should ever happen to one of our guys on scene or especially as the scene is winding down and if we get an ambulance call, we’ll send them to take our ambulance call for us while we’re working on the fire and they also respond  with a tender in the Town of Marathon. I’ve been working probably for a year to get auto-aid agreements in place and I talked to Chief Bowen at Riverside (Fire District) and he denied and said they don’t have enough staff and didn’t want to commit them to responding to all of our fires. I talked with Chief Barteck in Wausau and he is open to it, but he’s researching with their legal department and that’s where the contract sits right now and has been for 2 months. - Opall asked and what exactly is the auto-aid? - Chief Finke said they would get paged the same time we do and they would respond with one engine and four firefighters. - Deputy Chief Lang said with those types of agreements there needs to be an agreement between the Chiefs and then it would come to the Board for you to approve that. - Chief Finke said just like we’ve done with the Mosinee agreement in the past. Next slide is the number of firefighters we’ve had on scene over the last four years. We have added a couple more full-time people over the last couple of years, the number has jumped up a little bit which has helped. - Cronin asked do people come in for fire calls? - Chief Finke said we get a few. Fire Marshal Christiansen, Deputy Chief Lang and I are pretty much standard, Engineer Riesterer is pretty dependable and lives in Weston. - Schaefer asked is there anyone out there that’s just a firefighter and not an EMT? - Chief Finke said we looked at that years ago and we really didn’t get much interest. - Deputy Chief Lang said the way that we’re structured and staffed, we’ve tried to hire EMT only and train them in fire and we’ve tried hiring fire only and train them as EMT. We’ve had a lot more luck hiring EMT because we can have them do IFT and keep them engaged, when we’ve hired firefighters, they’re not here, they’re not engaged, don’t show up and then a lot of the times they don’t pass EMT and we’re paying a bill for a class that’s not passed. - Chief Finke said the next slide is comparable departments as far as staffing numbers for Stevens Point, Wisconsin Rapids, Marshfield, Wausau and Merrill. When Deputy Chief Lang and I look at this, if we’re going to pick out one, we always pick Marshfield. Marshfield is very close geographically, the City of Marshfield is close to the same size as the Village of Weston and the Town of Rib Mountain and we have a little more population, but call volume is almost identical every year. Stevens Point has a couple more guys than Wisconsin Rapids and Marshfield. Then call volume they’re all fairly close to us, but just a little bit more, but we have significantly less staff. We have 4 less everyday than Marshfield does and we run almost the same number of calls. The next slide I broke it down by calls per firefighter. If you look at how many calls there are for the year and then divide that by the number of firefighters actually running those calls, so how much work does each guy have to do basically, we’re significantly higher than everybody. - Cronin asked does this include our part time IFT people? - Chief Finke said this is daily staff. Also, any fire department across the country it’s very rare that their full staffing is actually what they’re working with every day because, somebody’s having a baby, somebody has a bad shoulder or back, somebody’s on PTO. - Deputy Chief Lang said when we’re talking about staffing, we always try to figure that we’ll have two people off every day. - Chief Finke said the next slide, with the other departments, in Stevens Point, Wisconsin Rapids, Marshfield, Wausau and even Merrill, if you ask their Chief, Deputy Chief and even their EMS Division Chief how many ambulance calls they go on every year, I’m going to guess that number is probably zero. This year just in the first quarter between myself, Deputy Chief Lang and EMS Division Chief Bechel, we took 37 calls and between the three of us we’re going to take 150 calls this year. That was 23 EMS responses and 14 fire responses both on and off duty and none of us have an issue with that. I don’t mind at all running calls, and when we go on calls it’s because we have to, not because we want to, it’s because everybody else is gone. The next slide is response time trends, unfortunately I would’ve like to have actual numbers for you, but the software that we’re getting rid of is broken, but I can tell you our response time to both the Town and the Village are steadily increasing because the main thing is that it’s very common that the ambulance in Rib Mountain is out and there’s another call over there whether it’s Rib Mountain, Stettin, Marathon or any area that station covers and the ambulance from here has to respond over there and even more often the ambulance from Rib Mountain is responding over to Weston. Med 11 is the ambulance in Rib Mountain has come over here 55 times already this year and one of the ambulances from here has gone over there 23 times. - Cronin asked, that’s just quarter one this year? - Deputy Chief Lang said yes. - Chief Finke said and when we start doing this, it inevitably ends up those are busier days for hours and can’t get caught back up and back to your own station. Which again, it isn’t the end of the world, it doesn’t really matter to the guys where they’re responding to the calls, but from your prospective, the residents are waiting longer for an ambulance. The next slide is mutual aid, so far this quarter, Wausau Fire has had to come in 16 times and Riverside has come in 4 times, so we’re going to have to call for mutual aid 80 times this year. So, 80 times $400.00 - $500.00 a call, that’s $30,000.00 - $40,000.00 worth of revenue that we’re losing number one and you’re always going to have to call some mutual aid. - Schaefer asked why is it so much more than last year? - Chief Finke said because we’re running the rescue truck. Last year we were not running the rescue truck, and there were many times on a daily basis that we had zero fire coverage in the Town and the Village. If a fire came in, we had absolutely nobody to send because everybody was on ambulance calls. - Schaefer said now that we have one guy covering at each station the fire truck. - Chief Finke said we have two guys at this station on a fire truck, nobody in Rib Mountain. - Schaefer said since we have two guys on a fire truck, we’re one ambulance down. - Chief Finke said correct, if we’re at 6 or 7 people on duty. If we have 8 people on duty, then we have three ambulances covered. - Battalion Chief Genrich said which is very low. - Schaefer said I saw this as I read ahead. Has anyone noticed this and complained? - EMS Division Chief Bechel said I’ve heard complaints outside from other departments. People are bad mouthing, because they don’t know the story behind, once I’ve explained it’s been ok. They’re perceiving of “oh SAFER only has two ambulances”, because they didn’t understand what was behind it. - Chief Finke said everybody is going to call for mutual aid at some point and that’s expected and normal, and happens all over the country, but 80 is a lot. - Cronin asked how many times have we gone to Wausau this year? - Chief Finke said 7. Mosinee is the department we mutual aid to the most, they’re very short staffed. The next slide is third shift and our part time staff and majority time staff make $13.50/hour right now when they’re working third shift. Years ago, when that concept was originally brought up because this was a Rib Mountain thing and more common that you slept through the night than that you would go out on a call. Now we basically never sleep through the night, in 2019 third shift which is considered 11pm – 8am and we responded to 511 calls and last year we were at 732 calls. The third shift call volume has increased exponentially. The one thing the part time and majority time people have figured out and it’s unfortunate for us, when they work overtime which some of them do, the overtime is a blended formula which is complex, the more third shift hours they pick up, drives their overtime rate way down. - Maloney asked is overtime 1 ½ or 2 times? Over 40 (hours)? - Deputy Chief Lang said 1 ½ over 212 hours in 28-day period. - Maloney asked so you have to hit the 212 (hours)? - Chief Finke said 212 hours in a 28-day period, and anything over 212 is considered time and a half. - Deputy Chief Lang said if they work extra hours the first half of the cycle, they get straight pay. Then that carries over into the second half of the cycle so when they hit the 212 hours, anything over that they get their time and a half. - Chief Finke said the next slide and what we’d really would like to get to and I know we brought this up last year, we would really like to get to nine per shift. That still puts us below what other departments our size are running, but that at least allows us to staff three ambulances on a daily basis and it gives us some kind of fire response at the same time. Nine per shift with a minimum of seven and we really have to allow for there to be two people off per day, we’re hoping that if we do nine and a minimum of seven that we’ll get POC’s to pick up and most days be at eight. So again, allows us to maintain three ambulances, gives us minimally sufficient staffing numbers at fire scenes in a reasonable time, a little more of a safe response of what we currently have and again, there’s a lot of times especially in Rib Mountain when we have 6 guys on duty and there’s only 2 over there and that station runs roughly four ambulance calls a day and each ambulance call takes about an hour ish depending on where they’re going and there’s 4 – 6 hours a day where the Town of Rib Mountain has no fire coverage, they do, but it’s coming out of this station (Weston). - Deputy Chief Lang said nine and seven that’s minimal staffing, if we would be at nine, we would still have a skeleton crew. We’re low staffed for the amount of calls even at nine. - Chief Finke said the biggest issue we’re running into right now is that most departments can kind of rotate their guys through like, Merrill for example works a 48/96 and their primary paramedic the first day of their shift are on the ambulance, the second day of their shift they’re on the engine. Our guys work the same schedule, but they’re on the ambulance all the time, that Engineer is on the ambulance for 48 hours at a time so, if they’re up all night tonight, they’re up all day tomorrow too. - Schaefer asked if we went up to $17.00 or whatever you pay for third shift right now, would that help? - Chief Finke said it’ll make the majority time people happier, but our part time people that don’t work third shift still wouldn’t work third shift and they told us. - Deputy Chief Lang said it’ll help with retention; it will not help with getting people to cover that shift. - Chief Finke said we’ve talked to several of them and they said it doesn’t matter if you’re paying me an extra $4 - $5 an hour, I’d rather sleep at home in my own bed and not have to get woke up all night. The next slide is part time staffing issues and with quarter one (of 2023) with the way the schedule is set right now, we had a total of 3,240 hours that were available for part time staff to work. Only a little over 1,800 of those hours were picked up. That means we had 1,400 hours or about 16 hours a day that were either opened or we had full time or majority time people pick them up and that doesn’t take into account any time a full-time person takes time off and in the first quarter there were another 409 hours for a total of 3,649 hours open to be picked up in the first quarter. Of all of our part time staff, only about 3-4 of them work third shift, the other ones just won’t. We do have one guy who is actually working a lot more third shifts, but then again, we have little things that come into play because he works full-time, and has to be to work at 8am and he leaves (SAFER) at 6am and sometimes we run into the issue between 6am – 8am that we have a weird open shift and a lot of times either Deputy Chief Lang or I fill that. The next slide is firefighter/paramedic and we’ve had a discussion and it was my idea to come up with three full-time firefighter/paramedics and three full-time firefighter/EMT basics. I did the basics for two reasons, number one they make 6% less and saves us a little bit of money and number two, I wanted three guys, one for each duty day that could focus a little bit more on firefighting and rescue. We have a lot of rescue disciplines that we need to know, tech rescue, water rescue, vehicle extrication and those types of things so they could focus a little bit more on that and not have to focus so much on medical care. I got a fair amount of pushback and that is still being discussed. Adding 6 people with 3 starting the first of the year (2024) and 3 starting July 1st (2024) to offset costs a little bit. Minimum staffing of 7, with daily staffing of 9. - Schaefer said you’re displacing the POC and majority time with full-time staff. - Chief Finke said the majority time would stay; we’d be displacing the POC. - Deputy Chief Lang said we’d still need the POC, we’d be adding 2 more and still relying on 2 majority time and one part time person every single day to get our staffing. We’d be displacing half an FTE every day, the 12 hour that is picked up by part time. - Cronin asked how many of our majority time people are going to go for these positions? - Chief Finke said maybe one, because none of them are paramedics. We have 7 majority time right now and only one is a paramedic. - Cronin said that’s one of my concerns, I didn’t want to take all those majority time people we have and then suddenly we can’t find majority time people and then we’re back in the same situation. - Deputy Chief Lang said if we would hire three basics, I anticipate all three of them would be filled by majority time people. - Schaefer said I’ve heard there’s a lot of full-time departments that will not let them work part time on other departments. Like if you’re with Wausau you cannot go. - Deputy Chief Lang said they cannot do that anymore because they accepted the SAFER (Staffing For Adequate Fire And Emergency Response) Grant and that’s part of the SAFER Grant so they had to rework their contract. Everyone on Wausau can work where ever they want when their off duty. - Chief Finke said the next slide is how we would staff, there would still be a 24-hour shift for a POC at station 1 every day, so there is a minimum of 24 hours a day available for a part time person. Both stations, there’s really a total of six paramedics on a day when you consider the Battalion Chief and Captain. Between the Engineer/Paramedic, Firefighter/Paramedic at each station, there’s at least four so there can be a rotation there. I’m a little bit concerned with burnout; we’re running the same people every single day right now. - Schaefer said looking at this you’re going to have two ambulances at station 1 essentially. - Chief Finke said if we’re fully staffed, we would. It will give guys a chance to rotate which will help. The next slide is overtime costs, really aren’t horrible and they’re trending right now to be a bit lower than last year and that is partially because Deputy Chief Lang and I pick up a fair amount of shifts. I don’t know if adding these people swing those overtime costs one way or the other, but this is where we’re sitting right now. Next slide is funding sources, we’re anticipating an increase in about $300,000.00 next year because of Medicaid reform. We know that the numbers are already being collected for what we’re going to receive as the first of this year, we just don’t know when we’re physically going to receive it. It was supposed to be the first of next year, receiving the money from January thru June of this year. Now that sounds like that’ll get pushed back to March of next year. - Cronin asked the 8.7% increase is not on top of the $300,000.00? - Chief Finke said it is on top of that. - Cronin asked what is the dollar amount? - Chief Finke said about $40,000.00 - $44,000.00. It didn’t get finalized until February, so we didn’t budget for it. I think between the 8.7% and the $300,000.00 that should cover the vast majority of those positions. I don’t have firm numbers yet, I wanted to go through this with you first and then I can work up an official budget. We may need a little tax levy increase for the other costs that go up every year; fuel, insurance and those types of things. I don’t think we should really need a tax levy increase for the staffing. - Cronin asked what are the payrates going to be for those two positions? - Deputy Chief Lang said they’re already set. Firefighter starting pay is $48,000.00 and paramedics would get 6% on top. - Cronin said what about health insurance? - Chief Finke said they would get health insurance and right now a family plan is a little over $19,000.00 a year and whenever I do the budget, I assume every full-time employee is going to take insurance and they’ll all take a family plan and budget for the worst-case scenario. - Cronin said the $19,000.00 is our portion? - Chief Finke said I always calculate $19,500.00. So, health insurance, wages, WRS. - Cronin said so realistically we’re right around $75,000.00. - Chief Finke said I can bring back firm budget numbers, I didn’t want to put that ahead. - Cronin said I’m on board and I would like to see more in-depth numbers. Based off the Medicaid and Medicare funding and the lost revenue we’ll get back, the numbers make sense. - Schaefer said I just worry about there only being one POC position. - Deputy Chief Lang said there are a lot of part time shifts not covered. - Cronin said I would say that times have changed and the part time staff is not the backbone anymore. - Chief Finke said I have zero intention of getting rid of part time people. We still continue to put a lot of time, effort and training into the part time people. We send them to training, we give them daily training, we invested in an online training platform so they have more options for training. - Maloney asked current full-time staff is at what number? - Deputy Chief Lang said 16, and that includes admin staff. - Maloney said and total full-time and part time is? - Deputy Chief Lang said about 50. Action: Bring back during budget time. Discussion and possible action on Increase of Fire Standby Fees. - Chief Finke said I wanted to see what the Boards feeling was of having a small increase of our fire standby fees, we have not made any adjustments in them for the third year. There’s been significant inflation, increased employee wages, healthcare costs and insurance costs. So, my proposal was to propose a 5% increase starting in 2024. Right now, the municipalities pay $22.00 per $100,000.00 of assessed value and a 5% increase would raise it to $23.10 per $100,000.00 of assessed value. - Schaefer said that would be all the municipalities that we serve. - Chief Finke said that would be (Town of) Marathon, (Town of) Stettin and Town of Weston. We haven’t increased it for 3 years, the contracts say if we do want to increase it, we have to notify each municipality by June 30th.  - Langenhahn asked is it assessed value or equalized value? - Chief Finke said I believe it’s assessed and it’s in their contract. - Langenhahn said we just had a reassessment. - Chief Finke said it’s assessed. We don’t know what their new assessed value is, but the Town of Marathon would go from $24,696.21 to $25,931.02. We don’t have to make a decision on that tonight, I wanted to get some input from the Board. We can use a different number or we can leave it as is. - Schaefer said it’s not a lot of money, so it’s not make or break. - Chief Finke said if you would like, I can look at the new assessed values and put together a dollar impact. - Deputy Chief Lang said if the assessed values went up quite a bit, then we could just use that and hold off a year. Action: Look at increased assessed values. Fire Commission Appointments. - Chief Finke said we have a few Fire Commissioners coming up, Mr. Tatro for the Village (of Weston). - Maloney said he already said yes and I will be appointing him and taking that to our Board. - Chief Finke said and I think Weston did Mr. Phelps also, correct? - Administrative Assistant Latimer said it’s selected by this Board. - Chief Finke said this Board chooses the at large member of the Fire Commission. The Town (of Rib Mountain) is Mr. Hebbe and I sent emails to the clerks for both municipalities to let them know so they’re aware. Action: Bring back to June Agenda for vote. Board of Directors Appointments. - Chief Finke said the Board of Directors we have Langenhahn, Schaefer and Cronin will need to go on your municipality agendas. Attorney Referral. - None End of Month Budget review. - Chief Finke said the up-to-date budget is in there, and everything looks good. There was a deposit today from LifeQuest $127,409.00 and we’re running roughly $50,000.00 ahead of budget. - Schaefer said it shows for the end of March $288,000.00 if you round up to $300,000.00, that’s $100,000.00 per month and that puts us behind. - Chief Finke said that is not three months of revenue, I don’t know how Trautman does this. - Administrative Assistant Latimer said the deposit that we receive in January is put back to December of 2022. - Chief Finke said I promise you we’re ahead. E. Staff Reports Report from Fire Chief - Fire Chief Finke said I picked up our UTV from E.J. Metals today and will go in-service tomorrow. That is going to Station 1 and is 100% identical to the one that’s sitting here, same UTV, same skid, same trailer. - We’ve been fairly busy and we did have the one structure fire in Rib Mountain. - We have a physician on the fire department and will be one of our medical directors. We continue to have two, one from MMC and one from Aspirus who is Dr. Nielsen and he’s been with us for quite a while. This is Dr. Mignon Rademan, a young doctor, very energetic and works shifts one or two a month. The last time she worked a shift we had a transfer that came in from Neillsville to UW and it couldn’t work out any better. The patient had multiple complex issues with multiple medications and we were lucky to send an ER physician to take a transport and was the primary caregiver. - There’s a small part of the Town of Mosinee that’s on our side of the culvert and we worked with Chief Grahn from Mosinee and we’re covering that small section. - This may trigger a little bit of discussion and we can probably put it as an agenda item on the next meeting based upon what the Board wants to do. Station 1 needs some repairs and Rhoden is aware of this because Kufahl was down last week and it’s probably more updates and maintenance than it is repairs. Carpeting that  needs to be replaced and painting that should be done all on the first floor, the second floor is newer and is good right now. The carpet in all three offices has some spots missing or tore out and the training room has a big tear in the middle of the room. Technically the building maintenance contract reads is that the district has to pay for that as a whole because it’s considered maintenance. For painting and carpet, I did not get quotes yet because I wanted to bring this up and get feed back on how we want to handle this and I think we’re going to spend $30,000.00 - $40,000.00, it’s a fair amount of carpet and paint. o Deputy Chief Lang said keep in mind that building is on the cusp of being 20 years old. We’ve done lots of repairs over the 20 years and we redid the Captain’s office last year completely with paint, carpet and desk. o Chief Finke said the physical work we did on our own. o Maloney said I don’t want to be a stinker here, when’s the last time we’ve taken something like this on maintenance and took it to the district? o Chief Finke said this is by far the biggest maintenance project that we’ve had to do. o Maloney said because Weston pays 73%? o Chief Finke said 66%. o Maloney said ok, 66% of maintenance on that building. We’ve (Village of Weston) got about $1,200,000.00 going into this (station 2) building right now and its maintenance. We’ve got painting on the outside, we’ve carpeting, wallpaper coming off, toilets, I mean what do you call maintenance versus not maintenance. o Deputy Chief Lang said we talked about carpet squares because they’re easily maintained and replaceable. o Schaefer said we came into this district with a fabulous new building and you guys came in with a beer distributor building and it needed to get up to our standard. o Chief Finke said that’s a discussion moving forward, because both buildings are big and because this one had a ton of updating done it will eventually need updating again. That’s my question is how this Board wants to handle that. o Rhoden said routine maintenance SAFER will be responsible for all routine repair, maintenance, cleaning or replacement of the doors, windows, wallcoverings, computers. o Chief Finke said there’s been nothing major done to this building. There’s been little items like fixing garage doors. o Schaefer said we redid the plumbing. o Deputy Chief Lang said we have a leak in the roof that’s been patched several times. o Chief Finke said and the Town has paid for those things. I don’t know what the Town’s plan is, but Kufahl was taking information of the furnaces and air conditioners. o Schaefer said you went ahead and updated this building and paid for it, and that’s a voluntary payment. o Chief Finke said the other thing to think about long term it will affect both communities eventually, some of those things Rhoden mentioned in that contract would be a massive expense to the district. Commercial windows or if one of the overhead doors had to be replaced and we could be talking $100,000.00. 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: We hired a full-time Captain who was an internal Lieutenant Andrew Lohman who will start April 29th. The training Academy started on March 8th and next week is their last week, we have 5 firefighter/EMT and 3 IFT staff. - EMS & Fire Incidents: EMS and fire responses are there with their correlating graphs on the following two pages. - Training: This is the first month we gotten a good handle on what our EMS training is now that we’ve gone to the online format. Still a big push on technical rescue and the crews have been doing quite a bit of training with the hovercraft. We’ve recently added reinspections to the on-duty staff because Fire Marshal Christiansen is way over worked. - Apparatus: The report is there.  - Fire Prevention/Public Education: The use that we’re getting out of the fire stations, we’ve had a huge community involvement this year. There’s a Stepping On class that went from January till middle of March and hosted by the ADRC (Aging & Disability Resource Center of Central Wisconsin) with about 30 people every week at station 1. On March 1st the DNR held a class there as well. We’re trying to get that community outreach for more than just 911 and our uses. - 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, May 9, 2023, at 17:30 at SAFER Station 1. - Cronin has nothing. - Langenhahn has nothing. - Opall has nothing. - Schaefer said if we want to take a look at that language, we should as a Board. We decide with more detail what should and shouldn’t be paid. - Maloney said on behalf of the Village of Weston on how we are allowing the fire department and police department to use our old building at will, and all they have to do is let people know and we are not charging anybody. G. Adjourn Motion by Opall to adjourn. Second by Langenhahn. Motion carried 4:0. Maloney adjourned at 19:33