Half an hour before the open public safety meeting, 43 people crowded into the small meeting room across the hall from the Austin City Council chambers for the continuation of last week’s council’s fire committee meeting.

Thursday, September 28, 2000

Half an hour before the open public safety meeting, 43 people crowded into the small meeting room across the hall from the Austin City Council chambers for the continuation of last week’s council’s fire committee meeting.

This time there were no fire calls to take away the firefighters.

Wednesday’s committee meeting could aptly be termed a rewind meeting, because the meeting had continued without the firefighters Sept. 21, but committee chairman Neil Fedson started it again last night from when the firefighters had left.

Citizens at the meeting – Charlene Blowers and Alden Qualey – pointed out that they want to know someone is at the fire station to respond to their call immediately.

Emergency medical technician James Lunt addressed the "golden hour" that a trauma victim – like someone trapped in a car accident – has to get to a Level One facility like St. Marys Hospital in Rochester.

"If you take 15 minutes of response time away from that victim because the Fire Department has to be paged in to extricate him, that trauma patient probably won’t make it," Lunt told the committee members.

Again the meeting was unfinished, this time because of time constraints. However, committee members didn’t continue the meeting to a later date; instead Fedson called for a motion to close the meeting and move across the hall to council chambers for the 7 p.m. public safety meeting. No decisions were made at the meeting, which was officially a council work session. Right now, the tentative budget for 2001 includes pay for 10 full-time firefighters, including the chief, one less position than a year ago. However, the future of that 11th position is not entirely in the hands of the council, because dismissed firefighter Dana Miller has appealed that decision and the case is currently in the hands of a state arbitrator. Funds for his salary are in the city’s contingency fund.

Resident Knowles Dougherty pointed out during the meeting that, according to figures given by McGarvey, it would cost the average homeowner 23 cents a day for 13 more full-time firefighters, a number almost double what the firefighters are asking for.

However, the Fire Department spotlight wasn’t only on full-time staff positions. Deborah Hughes, the wife of a part-time firefighter, asked the council to remember that the part-time firefighters are exactly that: part-time.

"They have full-time jobs elsewhere and they don’t have to respond to every page," she told the council. "I believe they do a tremendous job at the Fire Department, and I also believe they are currently understaffed. We’ve also missed the point of extrication – remember that the Fire Department plays a vital role in extrication," she added, speaking of the department’s Jaws of Life rescue tool that is used when accident victims must be extricated from vehicles.

There were many questions that remained unanswered after the meeting, chief among them the question of when the council will make a decision on the direction of the Fire Department.

That’s unclear. While 2001 budget questions must be resolved before the Truth In Taxation hearings on Nov. 27, because Miller’s return to the force is possible, the decision isn’t totally the council’s.

Fire committee chair Neil Fedson was non-committal, saying only that he wouldn’t expect any kind of decision before the next council meeting.

Also at Wednesday’s public safety work session:

n Police Chief Paul Philipp again argued the merits of hiring two more police officers to bring the force to 30 sworn officers. There was little discussion as the council has already provided for the two additional positions in the 2001 budget.

n Gold Cross Ambulance operations supervisor Brad Niebure warned the city that lean times were approaching for ambulance operators, with federal mandates standing to cut their income by 30 percent to 40 percent.

"We may be coming forward in the future to say that we need community dollars to maintain the services that we have here in Austin," Niebure told the council. "Currently we run six calls a day. That’s almost double what we did five years ago. We do it with the same number of people, yet our revenues are being cut. I just ask that you keep us in mind when discussions like this happen."