Last night, the Chief of the Fire Department for the City of New Haven presented their decision to cut services in East Rock by eliminating our local fire engine and two fire fighters.

As part of the deal, the city will purchase a $60,000 ALS (Advanced Life Saving) unit: essentially, a truck with two paramedics, and house it in our station. It will go on up to 3500 calls per year, roughly 8 per day, serving New Haven county, and operating city-wide with a similar unit being housed elsewhere.

The Chief presented this as a "service increase": due to an increase in ALS calls, they have two units currently handling 6,000 calls each. Projected increases in call volumes means that each unit will be handling approximately 3400-3500 calls per year after this change.

I attended the meeting with about fifty of my neighbors, and East Rock aldermen Justin Elicker, Matt Smith, and neighboring alder Alfreda Edwards. They organized this meeting to let residents ask questions about the proposal and hear the research which directed the Department to make this decision.

My neighbors had excellent questions about the proposal, which I will attempt to summarize below.

The principal questions seemed to be:
1. How much will response time be delayed?
2. Does this constitute a cut in fire suppression services?
3. In the event that the closest fire engine is unavailable, what station will a fire truck come from?
4. Can we charge for the ALS service and make back money?
5. Why are you doing this?
6. What other options did you consider?

The answers were:
1. We know this, we did the research, but we don't have the information handy.
2. No. You are losing 2 fire fighters, and one fire truck, but there will be no cut in suppression services, despite you losing 2 fire fighters and one fire engine.
3. Anywhere in the city.
4. Not really.
5. Because we have more ALS calls (city-wide) and less fire calls (city-wide), and it is not fair to send out our two current ALS units on so many calls.
6. An incredibly expensive, major expansion of staffing and vehicles. (I believe he said about 2 dozen new firefighters)

From the top: The fire chief expects us to believe that losing two firefighters and a fire engine will not impact response times "at all", but could not provide these numbers. He also states that the sole reason for this shift is to have more ALS units in service, however, he could not or did not provide data showing that our current ALS units are unable to satisfactorily respond to medical calls. He downplayed cost-savings, but mentioned that despite spending $120,000 in vehicle costs, we'd save money on two positions. He did not give salary figures for those two positions, but I suspect they aren't more than the $120,000 initial vehicle cost.

I can only conclude that the research has not been done. If the research had been done, it would have been essential to bring it--or at least a rough memory of the numbers--to a community meeting solely held to discuss this. I have an extremely hard time believing that the person who proposed this--who repeatedly assured us "this didn't come out of nowhere, we did a lot of research"--would neither remember the numbers nor bring them. I should note that I pushed for this meeting to occur a week and a half ago, but was told that it would have to be delayed so they could get some data and information together: after the decision had already been made. It only confirms my suspicion that this was not a data-driven decision, and the research alluded to does not exist.

I was extremely frustrated at two other things in particular. One, that the Chief and his Assistants kept insisting that there was "no cut" to services, while acknowledging that we would no longer have a dedicated fire engine, and we would be losing two firefighters, who would be assigned to city-wide medical calls.

Second, and perhaps most frustrating of all, was how the Chief and Assistant Chief Egan kept whispering to each other in the middle of citizen's questions. I have no idea why they needed to conduct an additional meeting during our meeting, but found it extremely disrespectful and rude for the presenter to be having quiet conferences with his assistant literally in the middle of direct questions being asked of him.

Originally, we were told that this would be a big savings in money for the department: we'd be able to bill for these services. Last night, we were told that was not the case. We were not shown actual data on response times, nor did the Chief confirm that this would save taxpayers money. He also provided no data showing that the current ALS units do not perform at level.

While I appreciate the need to alleviate overworked ALS members, I remain unconvinced that this needs to be done on the backs of my neighborhood and my neighbors.

I encourage the Chief to research this issue and come back to us with a data-driven proposal that is supported by objective facts and known variables instead of relying on gut instinct and theories. The only metric presented to us was that fires were down last year from the year before and medical calls were up: as any statistician knows, two years is hardly a qualified sample, and I sincerely hope that this is not the full extent of the research done on this matter.

Please pay attention to e-mails from your alderman and other neighborhood groups. There will be additional meetings held on this and further information being released as we obtain it.