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Date: 6/30/2021
HAMPSHIRE COUNTY – On June 23, the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission hosted a public hearing on Zoom about a report for shared fire services in Goshen, Chesterfield, Worthington, Plainfield and Cummington.
Charley Rose, a member of the Worthington Select Board and chair of the Shared Fire Resources Study Committee, said the project has been under way for two years.
“Goshen and Chesterfield originally got this going and then Worthington, Plainfield and Cummington came on board. We initially started talking about public safety for all five towns, but we eventually decided to narrow our focus to fire rescue,” he said.
David Houghton, the project manager with Municipal Resources Inc., presented the report and said its goal is to create a blueprint for all five towns to work on.
“The goal was to create a report that would be a useful guide and something that people could pick up and use in the future. It is a lot larger than we originally agreed to work on but with all the dialogue we had with the stakeholders and chiefs, there was so much information, and the document came out much larger,” he said.
While the report offers sweeping recommendations for all five towns, Houghton said each town may have already started some of the recommendations.
“Some of the communities are already above and beyond what we are going to discuss tonight and some of the communities are not even near that yet. I did not select individual communities in the report and call them out in the report, I looked at the report as an overall project for the five towns,” he said.
Houghton explained that two of the most important factors in determining the recommendations for the reports were response times and staffing levels.
“We look at the response time as something that is critical. Fires used to double every minute, but that is not true anymore because of our building constructions and our furnishings we put in there, fires develop much quicker than that. The good news is there has been an improvement in response times in 2018, 2019 and 2020,” he said.
Houghton said currently the number of active staff is lower than it should be.
“Overall, the numbers look good but if you just look at the 81 that are active, we would like to see that number a lot higher than that. Even if you look at the overall number of 98, it looks like a lot but 98 between five towns looking at a 24/7 operation really is not a safe number so it should be quite a bit higher,” he said.
While the overall numbers are lower than what they should be, Houghton said the numbers of people in explorer programs is encouraging.
One of the biggest concerns for the five towns as well as the rest of the country is training new fire and Emergency Medical Service (EMS) before the current force retires.
“This need to train the new workforce prior to the active members aging out is going to be a challenge. We need to find ways to get the younger people involved in the fire service and EMS service and to properly get them trained,” he said.
While the report includes 39 recommendations, Houghton discussed the 10 most important recommendations at the hearing.
One of the biggest recommendations was to create a standard operating procedures manual that would be shared between all five communities.
“We want to create a manual of Standard Operating Procedures shared by every department. Having standard operating guidelines is important that it is written and is something that every member of every department is trained to so when they go to an incident, things are done the same between every department,” Houghton said.
Among the other recommendations were conducting risk assessments, applying for Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grants, larger social media presences for each department and identifying training and equipment needs.
In addition to the recommendations, Houghton said the report includes a seven-step process that ends in 2026.
“We developed seven steps and those seven steps are above and beyond the recommendations that were made. Every single phase needs to be evaluated midway through and at the end to find out how effective it is. The phases begin now and run through July of 2026. The total cost of all phases together is $1.24 million but that will have to be adjusted as population evaluations change,” he said.
With the report completed, Houghton said it is now up to the communities to apply the recommendations.
“It is going to be up to the stakeholders to pick apart the document and be able to figure out what can be done easily, what will take more time and then collectively figuring out how to move forward,” he said.
Those interested in reading the report can do so at www.pvpc.org/content/hilltown-regional-fire-services-feasibility-study.