Grosse Pointe Fire Authority Meets, Plans

The met for the first time Thursday to determine the next step and outline where they should begin to start achieving some of the efficiencies .

The authority includes the five directors of public safety, the Farms deputy director, Farms Lt. Jack Patterson and Woods City Administrator Al Fincham.

The establishment of a fire authority is the result of , a SEMCOG (Southeast Michigan Committee of Govenrments) expert and retired West Bloomfield Assistant Fire Chief, for the Grosse Pointe Public Safety Ad Hoc Committee. 

He studied how the five Grosse Pointe public safety departments could achieve more efficient fire operations and made several recommendations. 

Of those recommendations by Riggs, the ad hoc committee decided three were achieveable and asked each of the councils to approve their participation. The three operational efficiencies are:

• to purchase fire equipment for each of the five departments as one unit, in order to hopefully save money by buying in larger numbers and therefore reducing individual prices
• to train together
• to implement automatic aid response, which is in addition to the already established mutual aid agreement among the five Pointes and Harper Woods

All of the public safety directors have told Patch the three recommendations they agreed to achieve are things the departments should have been doing years ago, especially considering how often they work together anyway.  

Farms Public Safety Director Dan Jensen said Thursday the first meeting was productive and essentially allowed the fire authority to outline a starting point. Each of the representatives was sent away with homework to complete before the authority's second meeting, which is scheduled for late March, Jensen said.

The first area the authority is addressing relates to establishing the automatic aid protocol, Jensen said.

Automatic aid is intended for large structures or heavily occupied structures where a fire could lead to major losses and means that firefighters from multiple departments will automatically respond to the first call rather than waiting for the jurisdiction's firefighters to call for backup once they arrive on scene and assess the situation.

Members of the authority discussed what locations they would like to consider as part of automatic aid, Jensen said, giving the example of Cottage Hospital as one that will be on the list. The high schools will likely also be on the list, he said.

During the next meeting, the authority will finalize the list and also discuss the protocol for who responds to what calls and in what order. The departments are already used to working together as they use each other at fire scenes under the mutual aid agreement and the only difference with automatic is when the patrol officers respond to a scene.

The departments already have protocol about which department is another department's backup, or second-alarm, third-alarm, fourth-alarm and fifth-alarm responders.

Jensen said the hardest of the three to achieve will be unified training. The difficulty is not related to an unwillingness to train together but is related to scheduling, he said. In smaller departments like the Pointes, training generally requires overtime to maintain a road patrol presence, he explained.

The willingness to pay overtime could be a challenge considering the tight budgets confronting each of the Grosse Pointes.

The authority will also establish what type of equipment each of the departments uses, its age and what changes are necessary to equip all the departments with the same gear. This goal is likely to be achieved over a much lengthier time period. 

The departments are not going to go out and buy all new equipment immediately. They will be analyzing the age of each department's gear, what they like or dislike about the specific type and will aim to replace specific equipment as necessary, but only after the current gear has completed its useful life.

This is the second topic the ad hoc committee studied. but recommended smaller consolidations, like what have done with their dispatch, with the long-term goal of still aiming to achieve one dispatch-lockup center.

Currently the ad hoc committee is awaiting approval from each of the city councils on a grant the ad hoc committee applied for to help pay for such a project. but before any discussion can happen about such a project, .