This item was initially heard at the April 28, 2016 meeting, where several representatives from various fire protection districts expressed concerns regarding the study. Consequently, the LAFCo Commission continued the item until the June meeting in order to allow staff to work with Citygate Associates on changes to the report. The changes are summarized below and are formatted in the attached revised MSR/SOI so that the changes since the April meeting can be easily tracked.
Summary of MSR/SOI Revisions
ISO Ratings
The LAFCo Commission requested Citygate Associates to include Insurance Services Office (ISO) rating information for the FPDs. A new paragraph has been included which explains the ISO rating system and the individual ratings for most of the FPDs have been added to their district profiles, as self-reported by the FPDs to LAFCo. The only districts not included are the Elkhorn FPD who has not paid to have an assessment completed and the Knights Landing FPD who did not respond to LAFCo's requests. The ISO ratings are provided in the table below and staff notes that three of the FPDs (but not all) with a rating of 2-3 are served by city fire departments (East Davis, Springlake and Winters).
| Fire District |
ISO Rating |
| Capay Valley |
8 |
| Clarksburg |
5/8B |
| Dunnigan |
6/8 |
| East Davis |
2 |
| Elkhorn |
Not Tested |
| Esparto |
5/8B |
| Knights Landing |
* |
| Madison |
6 |
| No Man’s Land |
9 |
| Springlake |
3/3Y |
| West Plainfield |
4/8B |
| Willow Oak |
3/3Y |
| Winters |
3/3Y |
| Yolo |
4/4Y |
| Zamora |
9/10 |
| * ISO Rating Not Provided by FPD |
Baseline Data Timeframe
In several key sections of the MSR/SOI, Citygate Associates clarified the timeframe for the data used in the analysis to distinguish between new information since the data was initially collected.
Missed Calls Data
Following the discussion regarding missed calls, Citygate went back to YECA and obtained additional data for the incidents classified as a missed call. Based on prior experience with other clients, Citygate had interpreted any call with a dispatch time stamp and no corresponding “enroute” or “arrival” time stamp as a missed call. With the additional data that included the incident notes as entered by the dispatcher, all of the missed calls were either CAD system tests, calls canceled prior to response, or dispatcher failure to make the appropriate enroute/arrival entries. Consequently, the missed call numbers from the prior MSR/SOI were, indeed, not accurate and have been removed from the report.
However, it was also discovered that YECA is not tracking instances when an initial dispatched FPD fails to respond to a call within the three minute policy, and must dispatch a second FPD. So there is actually no way of knowing who the underperforming districts are without manually going through the records call by call. Therefore, the revised MSR/SOI includes a new recommendation for YECA to begin collecting this data and sharing it on a regular basis with the FPDs. Citygate Associates considers a “Missed Call” to be when the responsible agency does not respond, whether or not another agency responds in its place. Thus there could be, and are reported anecdotally, missed calls in some districts for 2014.
Fiscal Conclusions
Citygate reworded the financial conclusions in order to improve the overall tone, but the data remains unchanged. The intent of LAFCo’s analysis is to highlight potential red flags and try to help those FPDs that are surviving on scarce resources, it is not to cast aspersions. The financial assumptions represent a worst case analysis and all the assumptions will not necessarily be accurate for each district. For example, many FPDs purchase used vehicles instead of new ones, as assumed for analysis purposes. And even so, as the report highlights all of the FPDs are currently managing their resources responsibly.
Regional Fire Service Framework
Per the comments received at the April meeting, Citygate Associates added a reference to the Yolo County Fire Chiefs Association as an agency option to provide the cooperative regional fire service framework, in addition to the West Valley Fire Training Consortium being the initial suggestion already listed in the report.
Public/Agency Involvement
The revised Public Review Draft MSR/SOI was emailed to all the FPD Chiefs (and whatever emails for board members that were available) on May 25, 2016. Staff received an email from the Winters FPD providing us with a missing board member's email address. We received an email from the West Plainfield Fire Department indicating that the countywide mutual aid agreement had recently been resigned by all the agencies, to update the 2007 date in the report. Staff also received another email from Winters FPD seeking to clarify if Recommendation #7 regarding FPDs adopting written financial policies was intended to apply to the contract districts as well. Citygate Associates replied back that, yes, it was intended to apply to contract FPDs as well for some minimal policies.
LAFCo also received a more formal request from the Clarksburg FPD to obtain Citygate Associate's assumptions, analysis, methodologies, tools and data used in analyzing the District's finances. Staff provided the excel spreadsheets that were used by Citygate Associates for their financial analysis in the LAFCo study which contains this information. These spreadsheets were also provided to all the FPDs, so that everyone would have the same information. However, staff also let the FPD chiefs know that the spreadsheets were created for internal use and not necessarily user-friendly for the public. Staff also acknowledged the inherent limitations when worst case assumptions are used consistently across all the FPDs, while each district obviously will have varying financial practices at the individual level. Rather than debating the imperfections at an individual FPD level, staff is trying to focus attention back to the overall intent to provide a worst case analysis and highlight any potential red flags (as previously described in the financial conclusions section). |