Friday, February 27, 2004
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Friday, February 27, 2004 |
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Peachtree City EMTs beat report to council By J. FRANK LYNCH Scores of volunteer EMTs, paramedics and public safety officials filled a section of the audience at last week’s Peachtree City Council meeting, begging the city to ignore recommendations made in a soon-to-be-released report from an Oregon consulting firm. The passionate pleas to deep-six the report didn’t fall on deaf ears, just ignorant ones. None of the councilmembers had seen the result of the consultant’s work. The study, completed following a series of on-site visits last month by Emergency Services Consultants, Inc., arrived at City Hall last week, said City Manager Bernard McMullen, and is tenatively scheduled to appear on the Council agenda at the March 4 meeting. Although copies of the report had been placed in the councilmembers’ mailboxes, none had time to read it before Thursday’s meeting. “You’ve put us at a disadvantage here because you’re talking about a report we haven’t seen,” Councilman Steve Rapson told the public safety workers. “But I can assure you that this council is going to make a decision based on the facts, and not what a consultant says.” McMullen said the concerns and recommendations made in the report are “complicated issues” and likely won’t be solved in one meeting. The city’s public safety volunteers were not apologetic about jumping the gun on the release of the report, however, which cost the city an estimated $17,000, they said. Claiming they are already understaffed, city rescue workers said that the recommendation to trim back equipment and personnel even further was laughable. The biggest concern was the suggestion that the city and county rescue departments enter into an “automatic aid” agreement in which the closest unit to any emergency call respond, regardless of jurisdiction. According to the Peachtree City fire and rescue workers, that would mean city crews would respond to far more calls than they do now, primarily in the fringe area between the city limits and the halfway point to the nearest county-based fire station. The “automatic aid” agreement was the consultant’s solution to what the local volunteers called a “profound manpower shortage.” “Automatic aid would establish an area outside the city limits to be covered by the Peachtree City Fire Department,” read Gary Half, treasurer of the volunteers, in a statement to the council. “We would become the primary responders in this area almost doubling our response territory. We would, under the proposal, cover a large portion of unicorporated Fayette County that the county fire department has currently failed to adequately cover,” said Half. It was uncertain what the county’s position would be to such an arrangement, but the Peachtree City emergency service personnel said the county would clearly benefit. “In response the only automatic assistance we would receive is a second or third engine on a fire call,” read the statement to the council, which was signed by more than a dozen paramedics and EMTs. The Peachtree City group took further issue with the quality of the report itself, which they said was full of errors both factual and clerical. One version made reference repeatedly to the city of Cadillac, Mich., which commissioned a similar audit from the same consulting firm recently. Councilwoman Judi-ann Rutherford was especially concerned with the alleged mistakes, requesting that a copy of the report with the errors highlighted be made available for the council. The report is likely to be up for discussion at the Council’s March 1 meeting.
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