By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
Even with a six percent increase in fire and emergency calls in 2017, the City of Wyoming has been able to achieve a 4 minute and 27 second response time throughout the city.
And in some areas of the city, such as the southwest end, those response times have improved to just over three minutes with the re-opening of the Gezon fire station to 24/7 and the addition of two quick response vehicles.
The city plans to maintain those response times and its level of service through the passage of a permanent renewal of its 1.25 mills for public safety, which is on tomorrow’s primary ballot. Chief Kim Koster credits a number of programs that have been developed over the past eight years — when the millage was first approved — that have helped provide more efficiencies within the department so the city could maintain services to its residents.
One of those programs was the training of 22 city employees from the parks and recreation and public works departments as firefighters. This training allowed the department to call upon the employees to help with fires and other emergency calls when needed.
“So in a matter of minutes we would have more than the eight or nine firefighters that we had on, but we could have fourteen or fifteen people who are trained in fire to an emergency,” Koster said during a recent interview on WKTV Journal In Focus. “That definitely increased our service to the community and gave us a lot. It also really provided safety for our firefighters as well because they had more (people) on the scene.”
The program is unique and Koster said she is not aware of another city that has trained city employees to be firefighters.
“We do have paid on-call as well, but in today’s society it is more difficult for employers to let a volunteer or a paid on-called firefighter to leave their job to go fight a fire,” Koster said, adding that the paid-on call staff are still important to the department.
“Between the part-time, the paid on-call and those dual-trained employees, we feel we are addressing our staffing issues efficiently and using tax dollars very wisely with that,” Koster said.
The city also purchased two quick response vehicles, medical vehicles that have firefighting capability, Koster said. These vehicles only require two people to man versus an engine which needs three to four.
“So we were able to put two of those machines out along with an engine from our fleet and we would have three vehicles that would respond to emergencies versus the two,” Koster said. “So we increased our response times to our citizens that way.”
Also in the fire department, three full-time firefighters have been added and a program was instituted to utilized part-time staff during high call volumes to help increase staff.
In the police department, the city has been able to save dollars through consolidations and collaborations with other area departments that included the centralized 911 dispatch, Koster said. The police department is also accredited, which only about one percent in the United States are.
“And that, I believe, really tells the taxpayers that we take our job seriously,” Koster said. “That we are accountable and we are transparent using their tax dollars to the best of our abilities.”
Showing that the city would use the money raised from the public safety to the best of its abilities was a key reason that the city decided to seek only a five-year millage in 2010, according to Major Jack Poll.
“So we went with the five-year millage so that after five years we could go back and say this is what we promised, this is what we accomplished,” he said.
However with costs continuing to climb and state funding shrinking, city officials see a need for those funds in order to maintain the current level of public safety services, which is why the 2018 proposal seeks a permanent renewal, Poll said.
