What Happened?
Fire departments in Bloomington and Normal, Illinois, are enhancing shared services efforts, improving communication and resource allocation strategies to increase efficiency and cost savings.
So what?
The Illinois Fire Chief’s Association released a study of Bloomington’s fire department, making recommendations on how mutual aid systems of cooperation can me better utilized with automated processing and technologies. When shared services become more routine, communities spend less time and money coordinating cooperation, and improve response times and cost benefits.
Per the study’s suggestions, both fire departments are considering using the same automatic vehicle locating system to help dispatchers locate where emergency vehicles are to determine what providers are closest to each call. The two cities could develop a mutual response card that directs dispatchers to the closest emergency services for faster delivery of help. A join emergency liaison committee has also been launched to investigate other ways fire departments and emergency medical services can create partnerships across communities for optimal use of resources and manpower.
Southern Milwaukee County Study
Also experimenting with consolidated fire services, researchers from the Public Policy Forum and Greater Milwaukee Committee, the Intergovernmental Coordinating Council analyzed efforts in southern Milwaukee County to address budget pressures with shared services. The research project looked and consolidation efforts of five municipalities in the county and created three models for approaching shared services that could be deployed in piecemeal so as to grow with the needs and available resources of the communities. The models included:
- Coordinated support services
Municipalities create unified bureaus to train emergency employees, maintain vehicles and conduct fire inspection services for all five fire departments.
- Operational consolidation
Communities develop a unified operations framework that calls for the closest employees or departments to respond to emergency calls for faster response times and better use of resources. The five fire departments will maintain their independent personnel, vehicles and governance under this model.
- Full consolidation model
The five municipalities would merge their fire departments into a southern Milwaukee County unit with a unique budget, personnel, equipment and operational framework that combines resources and manpower from all communities.
According to the study’s findings, sharing vehicles, particularly backup and replacement assets, can greatly reduce repair and maintenance costs for all departments. The operational consolidation model offers limited personnel savings as each department has its own practices and procedures in place. Thus, communities facing significant cuts to fire department expenditure should consider full consolidation in the future to enhance service quality while reducing costs. Under the full consolidation model, researchers estimate the fire departments could eliminate $1 million in annual operational costs and $4 million in five-year vehicle savings without closing a fire station. Many communities looking to adopt full consolidation of fire services may have to implement the changes slowly, adjusting operations in piecemeal to ensure high efficiency and no sacrifice to quality of services.
Other Fire Service Innovations
Gov1 has monitored fire department management nationwide as communities look to consolidation departments and adjust operations for cost savings.[/dw-post-more]