Speaker 1: Oh, it's. here today. Okay, yeah, here today, uh, the usual and the chief spokesman for the county, anything with proposals, only official come through me, any others may participate and talk, anything they say is not an official proposal, I make the official proposal. And we're here today to discuss your letter you, one of your letters you sent, the last one June 27th, so we're here today. So, uh, you want to kind of go through that, I guess identify any of the impacts that you're concerned about, that if we, uh, decide not to staff certain hours of the day stations.

Speaker 2: Uh, yeah, in addition to reducing staffing, total staffing. Um, well, we do have this here, um, I'd like you to look over real quick, just in case the possibility of avoiding, uh, barring over this issue.

Speaker 1: Well, staffing levels is a right, management right under the statutes, and we're not going to give that up, uh, to do that. I'm glad to bargain, uh, any impacts that you can identify, if we decide to move forward,

Speaker 2: and, uh, I kind of thought maybe that's the answer to this one, so I just thought I'd try.

Speaker 1: Nice try, but we can't give up that right. Alright, in that case, taxpayers may not like that ultimately.

Speaker 2: I have three copies of this, here's the original, alright, and this is the article we're proposing that identifies the issues in there, and how we would like to, uh, go about handling the issues, if you're going to continue to stand by the reduction in staffing. And we have, uh, this is all supporting documents for that, NIST study on fire-grown residential structure fires, um, NFPA 1710 recommendations, and your very own mini-budget presentation.

Speaker 1: I don't understand what you mean, what do you mean by the first section, what, this is what they were, or what you're... What's that? What are you saying in section one, to be clear? I'm not really clear, what are you, what are you saying there, and what are you meaning with that section?

Speaker 2: We're saying that when we signed and agreed to the last collective bargaining agreement, the staffing level per shift was what it's laid out here, in this article, or this section.

Speaker 3: Okay, and? So what are you saying with this? This is what it was?

Speaker 2: With section one still? Yeah. Yeah, we're saying when we signed the contract, that's what it was, so we're saying now you're reducing the staffing, so in order to, in order to compensate the people that are left on duty when you reduce the staffing, and it goes into section two. Okay.

Speaker 1: You know. I just didn't know what you meant by one, you're just outlining the condition, I didn't think there was some other meaning to it, you know, I was just trying to figure out what... It's basically... Okay.

Speaker 2: It sets up the whole article.

Speaker 1: The preamble to tell you what's what. Yes. Okay, all right. That's all I'm trying to get at. It's just like, what does it mean other than, it's just outlining where you once were. Your current conditions. Right. I understand, okay. Yeah, I gotcha. When you said section one, it made me think that was kind of like proposal or something. Right. Oh, no. Okay. It wasn't a proposal, okay.

Speaker 2: And obviously anything like that can be clarified if it's...

Speaker 1: Okay. Just making sure so I didn't later come back and misconstrue it. Okay, now number two. Okay. How would you do that? Because if you... Because you currently have reductions now. Training. So if somebody goes to training, they're going to get... Y'all going to give them 1% for what we already do today?

Speaker 2: We're not including training in there. And the reason that we don't include training is because those people are still on duty. They're subject to call back if there is a large event. And they are home, unavailable. They're on duty still. And they're still available to respond.

Speaker 1: But if somebody didn't show up to work today, they're not here either.

Speaker 2: But it's filled with overtime. Pardon?

Speaker 1: It's filled with overtime. Well, it's not filled with overtime. So how would you distribute this? Because I'll just make up a station somewhere out in the... And somebody doesn't show up and it's a two-person station. And they say, well, we'll move the other one somewhere else. The whole organization gets 1%.

Speaker 2: In that case, you're down by one person. Yeah, and you've browned out the station also. You've done two things.

Speaker 1: Why would somebody over and say if it's on the other side, over here on the west side, why would somebody on the east side who's not impacted get anything?

Speaker 2: Well, because they may be at any given time. Because they might be the next day. They may work overtime at that station. The person might not show up. But that's the next day.

Speaker 1: We're talking about the day it's happening.

Speaker 2: Why would they get money for the day it's happening? Because if there's a fire big enough, it could be a wildfire or whatever, in that area, any station in our county is subject to being called to that fire. If they're called to that fire, they're down one less person or a few less people or however many you reduce the staffing by. Thus, they're working with less people. They're doing more work. It's more dangerous, and they have less people.

Speaker 4: How are they doing more work? There's less people on the scene.

Speaker 2: If there's less people to do, if there's a certain job that needs to be done, you have ten people to do it. If there's only eight, they're going to do more work and harder work because there's only eight of them than if there was ten. Our main concern is the safety. That's our main concern.

Speaker 4: There's another side of that coin, too. Say you have ten people there now, and you have ten people then after this event, you're going to be left with less people to respond to the calls that are available after that event. It affects everyone, not just the responders.

Speaker 5: For instance, if you have station X, Y, and Z, and you were to brown out station Y, stations X and Z have a bigger area of coverage at that point where they're basically picking up the calls for station Y.

Speaker 2: That gets in a lot to the safety aspect of it because the longer it's lost.

Speaker 1: But you have it now, and that's okay. When you do your training, that's okay. But if we do it for overtime, it's not okay.

Speaker 2: We didn't say it's okay. We said that the training, first of all, the training has been going on for as long as I've worked here, so it's a little bit late to demand a bargain over that because it's been going on like that. This reduction in staffing and this browning out stuff is a new thing, so we did not feel it was appropriate to let it go. Right here, I'll give you this in just a second, we have the 2009 roster in this department. It shows almost three people at every fire station. Now then we have the current roster, not the current, but before this reduction in staffing occurred, which I asked the chief to please bring me a copy of, and there's two people at every station, three at some of the, or two people at certain ones, three at some of them, and then four at 44. Right here from County Evolution Florida Budget Workshop May 15, 2006, Mr. Dineen is in here talking in the meeting. Mr. Dineen stated fire services shows a 30% increase, which reflects an estimated addition of 49 positions to increase the staffing in order to maintain a three-person station average and avoid single firefighter response. He added it will also help align the county staffing with the municipality staffing, enabling the county to better negotiate first response agreements. If it was okay then, or it wasn't okay then, for a single firefighter response or not having the first response agreements, why is this so okay now? And that was 06, that was seven years ago. I have a bunch of problems with this.