Battalion Chief Cites Need for Fire Equipment and Stations

At a recent meeting in the San Fernando Valley, the vice president of the Los Angeles Fire Commission said responses to medical calls in hard-to-reach areas of the city were too slow to be of maximum benefit. He suggested charging fees in special assessment districts to generate revenue for the department to have sufficient resources to shorten those response times.

Battalion Chief Roger Gillis of the city Fire Department discussed the problems it faces when serving those areas and the concept of a special assessment district with Times correspondent Rebecca Bryant.

Question. A week or so ago, the vice president of the Fire Commission, David Fleming, said paramedic response time in some outlying areas of the city is too slow to be of maximum benefit in heart attack cases. How serious is the problem?

Answer. I think some of the key words were “of maximum benefit.” There’s no doubt that we would love to be able to provide quicker services throughout the city. The population has grown. The density in many areas has grown tremendously. The majority of our fire stations were built in the ‘50s and ‘60s for those times, and so we need obviously to have additional fire stations.

The mountainous areas have built up. The Santa Monica Mountains--those are areas where, obviously, locations of resources and topography are major contributing factors. In the Mulholland area and Mt. Washington, for example, the fire apparatus has to climb narrow, winding roads, steep terrain--they can’t get the speeds up that we can on the major roads. It’s probably going to take us longer to get into those areas.

On the average throughout the city for emergency medical service runs, for first responder, we average right about 4 1/2 minutes. Closer to five minutes for paramedic intervention. Five minutes is a standard goal for response time. We’d like to meet that every time we get a call. Obviously we do not; we can’t.

If I take a resource, especially in the outlying area, and I have them on an incident and it could be the stubbed-toe incident and now I have a heart attack call, that resource is tied up and now I have to go further away yet to bring a resource in and that of course increases response time into that area.

Of course the answer to that is more resources and more locations. And in some cases our stations need to be moved to a more central location within whatever district we’re talking about to provide a closer, quicker response time.

Q. In case of an emergency such as a heart attack, by what time must CPR be given before survival rates drop drastically?

A. We would use that four- to six-minute window. Our average response time is about 4 1/2 minutes. That’s to get a first responder on the scene and that’s to get CPR started. One of the things we’ve done in the last several years is training firefighters. Every firefighter is now (an) EMT, which means they can do CPR. We have now a defibrillator on every single company in the city of Los Angeles, which is markedly improved our heart attack success rate. The defibrillator is a machine that can monitor the person. It tells you exactly what their status is.

Q. If you had all the money in the world, how many more paramedics and firefighters would you have and where would they be?

A. I’d put a paramedic on every corner in the city. Obviously that’s the utopia.

The Fire Commission along with the people across the street at City Hall have asked us to look at that. There are studies under way to address that figure, to try to come up with an honest, hard figure. That we don’t have yet.

The ballpark figure is that the chief has identified would be 700 to 1,000 more resources or employees; 99% of that would be firefighter/paramedic resources that would be put out in the field. That would be our goal, which would mean building new fire stations.

Proposition 13 reduced us by 450 personnel. We lost a person off every company and we never got them back. We want more personnel, more companies, but we’re not looking to go back to where we were prior to Proposition 13. We’re not looking to build onto our individual firetrucks. We want more firetrucks, more fire stations, more facilities.

Q. Has the department determined where those new stations are needed?

A. That hasn’t been determined, but they’re developing a computerized program that would take our response times in any given area and tell us where we need to put resources to improve.

Q. It seems a special assessment district could create a dilemma: Well-off people would have to pay extra for what other people get in return for their taxes. At the same time, the less well-off might get poorer service because they can’t afford to pay. Doesn’t it make sense to tax everyone and give everyone the same level of service?

A. Yes. For us that’s an easy one. The mayor, the council, anticipated a shortfall a couple of years ago and directed the department to look into ways of producing some more revenue.

Benefit assessment was one idea we came up with because Los Angeles County Fire Department had used it. The key ideas were benefit assessment, a subscription EMS program and charging for EMS treatment. The benefit assessment was strictly fire-oriented and was all-encompassing for the city.

It wasn’t district-oriented. We don’t feel that’s a good idea. A hundred years ago across the country you paid for your fire protection. If you paid X amount of dollars, you put a little sign in front of your house that said you paid for fire protection. And if there was a fire, when the fire department rolled up, they looked for this little sign. If they rolled up and you didn’t have your little marker and hadn’t paid your dues, then they didn’t fight the fire in your home.

Obviously that’s not practical. It’s not good sense. It’s not L. A. City Fire Department’s way of doing business. If one district paid that assessment and the one next door did not, does that mean that district says, “You can’t use our resources over there?” We don’t operate that way. We service everybody. Anytime we’re called, we go. There really are no boundary lines.

Q. Can you explain the difference between benefit assessment, which is what the county has, and a special assessment district for paramedic services in outlying areas?

A. The benefit assessment that the county has is all-encompassing. Special assessment, and I’m not an expert, to me means you’ve taken a specific district within your boundaries and if that area is willing to pay, that would be a district assessment.

And that’s a term I know the commissioner used but isn’t something we ever addressed, and we again don’t feel that’s the way to go. If we’re going to do it, we do it for all and we provide the service and the assessment and everybody takes part in it.

They’ve never considered a special district assessment. I know that in talking with the chief, that’s not something he feels would be a wise thing to do. I think we’d get into territorial battles and again the well-to-do could afford it. Those who can’t, if you ask them for two more dollars, their budget is so tight two dollars would affect them. They wouldn’t be able to do it, and they wouldn’t vote for it because they couldn’t afford to. I don’t think it’s a good idea.