1A, Lake Johanna Fire Budget, Capital Facilities Need Study

Home Browse Search

RoseviUe Final Report EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The City of Roseville is a dynamic city located in the heart of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Though its population of 33, 690 now is increasing slowly as the City nears "build-out," a significaot amount of commercial redevelopment continues to take place. This promises to add even more jobs and establishments to the City's already impressive concentration of business activity. The Roseville Fire Department (RFD) is a paid-call organization, under the leadership of its first career Chief, hired in 1999. It has a corps of officers selected for - their training, education, experience, and performance. There are maoyexemplary administrative practices within the Department, aod the organization appears to be healthy. The average response time for all incidents is 6 minutes from time of dispatch to arrival on the scene, a respectable time, especially for a paid.call department. The Department also has an Insurance Services Office (ISO) rating 00, which is exemplary for this size city. Like most volunteer or part-time paid organizations, the RFD is facing a shortage of staffing, particularly in the daytime. The Department has implemented a "staffing" program whereby members work designated shifts in a station in order to provide an in:llnediate response to an emergency call. The RFD responds to about 600 incidents annually. As the City grows, there is a plan to redevelop the site of Station 1 for other purposes, which was one of the stimuli for this study. The study had a limited focus, primarily on station locations, and did not consider strategic issues of staffing or services provided. It attempted to aoswer a well-defmed question: Where should we locate fire stations to serve the City under three scenarios: 1) retention of the status quo, with sporadic "shift crews" according to the availability of part-time employees willing to work the shifts; 2) implementation of a 24-hour, seven day a week "staffmg" program in one of the stations; 3) hiring of a small career staff to supplement the part-time employees. The study formulated three station location options corresponding to the above three scenarios that the City presented. Based on our review of the Fire Department, interviews with City officials and fire department members and staff, and aoalysis using a TriData Corporation IU January 2002