Towns may share Rescue Service

Hoping to reduce Cumberland Rescue Service overtime costs currently running about $29,000 a month, Mayor Daniel McKee will begin advertising immediately, he told The Breeze Friday, for per-diem rescue service employees.

Additionally, he is "very close," he said, to shutting down one of the two rescue stations and developing a formal plan for sharing rescue services with the town of Lincoln.

McKee said he and Lincoln Town Administrator T. Joseph Almond are "having conversations about what it would look like" to develop a mutual aid strategy that sees a varying number of rescue crews on duty, depending on the time of day, covering both towns.

Almond calls it an "inter-municipal agreement" that would see the two towns share equipment and personnel to enhance service while cutting down on overtime and administrative costs.

Toward that goal, the two are analyzing how many calls come in per shift according to variables such as time of day and day of the week.

Almond, a retired Lincoln police lieutenant who is finishing his third year as town administrator, and McKee, who is starting his eighth year as mayor of Cumberland, have long said privately that emergency services might be better organized geographically east and west between the two towns rather than with each service keeping to its own side of the river.

Almond has just begun an analysis, but says, for example, that calls for rescue fall off by 80 percent after 1 p.m. Still, the two towns are each staffing two rescues, for a total of four, around the clock. Cumberland's rescues are in Ashton and Valley Falls while Lincoln's are in Lonsdale and Albion.

Could just three of those units cover the two towns during the early morning hours thereby freeing up personnel to take shifts that cover for squad members out sick or on vacation?

That's the analysis under way now. Almond says he expects to reassign and redistribute staff rather than reducing it.

"Significant" cuts in overtime may be possible.

"I'm wasting money staffing overnight in Lincoln and he's (McKee's) wasting money staffing overnight in Cumberland," he suggests.

Efficiency would be good news to McKee where $175,000 is budgeted for overtime this year while costs are actually tracking toward $350,000, says McKee.

Both leaders say rescue services in the two towns isn't especially expensive - $1.3 million for Lincoln and $1.4 for Cumberland - and both towns recoup about half of that through third-party reimbursement.

"Rescue service is not a big expense," Almond said. "It's pretty efficient."

Crews make a combined 7,500 calls a year, Almond said, or about 21 runs a day with some lasting as long as three hours.

In fact, both town leaders have high praise for the individuals on the rescue services with McKee saying "they are very well regarded. This isn't reflection on their work ethic or professionalism. They are dealing with life and death on a daily basis."

Says Almond, "Where it breaks down is with overtime covering for vacation or the sick or injured." Overtime for the two towns is running about a half-million dollars a year, he said.

It's high because each town staffs the crews with the number needed to run shifts around the clock. Covering for absent members boosts the hourly rate to time and one-half, from about $22 an hour to about $33. And that's what Cumberland is wrestling with.

Almond says he can promise residents won't see response time increased.

In fact, he predicts the opposite.

"The theory is that the more you isolate your staff and equipment then the more you create a problem" with response time.

Almond who is just diving into the analysis suggests that if the Albion rescue is busy then the next fastest response to the Lincoln Mall is Ashton, not Lonsdale.

However, if Valley Falls is busy, then Lonsdale, not Ashton, is a faster choice for One Mendon Road.

Almond is quick to admit that citizens "can be very parochial" about emergency personnel. "They like to see the word Lincoln on the side of the responding vehicle," he acknowledges.

News of the rescue talks comes as Almond continues his push to merge Lincoln's six fire districts.

In these two towns where 87 percent of fire district calls are for medical emergencies followed up by rescue crews, Almond says rescue and fire district issues are woven together, even though rescue services in both towns are municipal departments while fire coverage is handled by a total of 10 independent fire districts in the two towns.

Almond held a meeting last week with members of the six district boards of fire commissioners to discuss merging.

He'd begun the year by gathering together fire chiefs but says those talks didn't go far. "It was like asking kids to give up their toys," he said.

Instead, he's optimistic about working with the commissioners, he said, and has another meeting set for early November.

One person who attended the session last week described Almond's approach with the fire district leaders as "aggressive."

Almond says merging fire districts has been a losing proposition for years because the focus tends to be on the obstacles.

He says he's looking at the benefits and confident that if he lays out a plan, he can make it work.

He has also volunteered to take a look at Cumberland's fire district scheduling with an eye toward pulling all the towns' emergency personnel into a single detailed plan for covering the 50,000 people living on both sides of the river.

Cumberland's Acting Director Greg Noury expressed support for the mayor's plan to hire per diem rescue members. The caliber of those temporary staff members would be no different than new hires, he said.

"We're managing relatively small marginal fixes, that's what we're down to," McKee says of the $12 or so per hour in overtime costs the per diem plan will save.

Almond says that option isn't permitted in the contract Lincoln signed with its rescue service personnel.