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Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 3

President Wilshire

| am here, | am alone and | am being drowned out by sirens in the background. So | don’t know what that’s
all about and | can hear everyone. Thank you.

Susan Lovering, City Clerk
You have 13 in attendance.
President Wilshire

Thank you.

City Clerk Lovering

You're welcome.
President Wilshire

Also with us this evening is Mayor Donchess and Corporation Counsel Steve Bolton. We also have Fire
Chief Brian Rhodes in attendance. Tonight we have a presentation on the Master Plan Study for Nashua
Fire Rescue and | would like to recognize Fire Chief Brian Rhodes on the Master Plan Study for Nashua
Fire Rescue. Chief?

PRESENTATION

Master Plan Study for Nashua Fire Rescue

President Wilshire recognized Fire Chief Brian Rhodes on the Master Plan Study for Nashua Fire
Rescue.

Brian Rhodes, Nashua Fire Chief

Good evening. Thank you to all of you for taking this extra time tonight to hear the final results of this
Master Plan Study. So I’d be remiss if | didn’t thank you again for your support, the Board and the Mayor
that allowed us to proceed with this Master Plan. It is a pretty comprehensive document that takes a couple
of readings to start to understand. But | think we are very happy with the process; it took a little longer than
we wanted to due to COVID. Full disclosure, when the presenters come on, they are the two principals
who conducted this study, when we first talked, they asked, “Is there anything in particular you are looking
for’, and we said, “No, we want you to come in and | want you to tell us what is good, what is bad and what
is ugly with us”, because that’s the only way we are going to get better.

In this report, | think there are some good things, there are some things we can do better and there’s some
things that we need help with. So without further ado, | think what I'll do is I’ll turn this over to Stuart
McCutcheon and Mary-Ellen Harper from ESCI; let them present to you. If you have any questions when
this is over, I’d be glad to answer them.

Stuart McCutcheon, Director of Business Intelligence, ESC!

Alright, can everyone hear me OK?

Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 4

President Wilshire
Yes.
Mr. McCutcheon

Thank you so much. My name is Stuart McCutcheon and | have with me Mary-Ellen Harper. We are here
to present the final findings and a presentation of the Master Plan. In this presentation, | am going to spend
some time in the beginning covering some of the Department’s performance and identifying trends so then
when we get to the recommendations we have some of that little bit of background and hopefully answer
some questions that otherwise would be difficult to know without seeing some of that data in front of you.

So with that, let me get my screen shared. So Mary-Ellen and | work for ESCI, the Director of Business
Intelligence; she’s the Director of Operations. Just a little bit on ESCI, I’ve been in the business for over 40
years with the consulting arm of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. In addition to Master Plan, we
do community risk assessments, executive searches, hiring and testing, ISO benchmarking studies which
was included as a separate piece of our contract with you all and Chief Rhodes has that. And really what
we are here to do is to provide data driven approach so that when we find gaps or issues that need to be
addressed, we can provide you all, the elected officials, with some 2 or 3 of the most feasible options. The
data behind that to back it up and support it and then allow you all to make the best decision for your
community.

So here is me, Director of Business Intelligence. Prior to working for ESCI | was the Chief at (inaudible)
City Fire, which interesting point of fact, | found out later that Chief Rhodes’ brother lives in (inaudible) City
as well as also the Chief at Auburndale and the City of Davenport in Central Florida. And next I'll turn it
over to Mary-Ellen quickly so she can introduce herself.

Mary-Ellen Harper, Director of Operations ESCI

My name is Mary-Ellen Harper. | am the Director of Operations for ESCI. Prior to coming to ESCI | spent 20
years in Connecticut as the Director of Fire & Rescue Services for the town of Farmington Fire Department.
I’ve also done some teaching for the (inaudible) Fire Academy in New Haven, Fire State Fire College. And
my interesting point of interest is that my sister actually lives in Nashua and she’s been there for about 5
years and she’s a teacher in the next town over. So it was really nice to be able to come back and work in
a community where my own sister lives.

Mr. McCutcheon

Alright so just a little background, September 13, 2019 we were contracted to do a long-range Master Plan
for Nashua. And as Chief Rhodes mentioned, we had a few months’ hiatus there in the middle trying to
figure out how to get the process back up and going again. But the main purpose for this was to evaluate
the current operational service delivery, identify future service delivery and then to provide some
recommendations for approving service delivery.

So this is just a quick snapshot of the call volume year-to-year from 2014 to 2019. If you look at the EMS
you will see a spike there in the middle and that was due to the way that burn permits were being issued
and also running additional calls that were not emergency in nature. After a couple of years of trying that
the Department decided to go back to the way they were originally doing it and that returned that call
volume back. But overall, call volume is gradually increasing year-over-year. About 60% of what the Fire
Department does are emergency medical service responses. And then you see on the other side where
we have fire it is about 2%, false alarms, good intent and service calls; those are all non-emergency calls to
the Fire Department in addition to a lot of EMS. They also respond to a lot of incidents that are not
emergency calls but they are still responses that they have to go to.

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This is a quick map just showing you where incidents occur. So we took the incident locations, you are
seeing a scale so dark green there was only 1 call within that 10 acre hexagon; red there are more than
250 calls. So you can see that in this downtown area is where the majority of your calls occur. But in
addition to that, at the bottom right to the east of Station 3, there’s quite a bit of call activity on the other
side of the interstate as well as on the northside of the airport, there are pockets there were incident activity
is greater than the surrounding areas. This is a hot spot map, it’s just a different way of looking at the same
information and it is showing that the majority for call concentration is happening downtown in-between
stations 1, 2 and 4. And so this is what you would want to see that your stations are centered around
where your activity is located so that way you can get your firefighters to the scene.

This is an estimates 4 and 8 minute travel time, NFPA 1710 is the industry standard for career fire
department performance. So this is measuring or a model of how Nashua compared to that. So as you can
see it is about maybe not quite 50% yellow and then the rest green. There are a few areas in the City of
Nashua where travel times would be in excess of 8 minutes but they are either at the northwest or the
southwest portions of the City.

This is part of ISO, the Insurance Services Organization, this is a different way to measure the same thing,
but this is grabbing road miles within 1 % miles of your fire stations and comparing that to the overall road
base. And so with your current deployment, you are at about 50% coverage and they are trying to estimate
that same format of travel time.

This is an overview of your effective response force so you know a lot of times with fires, we might probably
only need one engine or maybe two engines to pump water, the rest of it we need people. For a normal
fire, around 17 to 18 to be able to conduct all the different tasks and operations that are going on
simultaneously. And so in this, your dark colored area are the areas where you are getting between 20 and
into 30 fire fighters to the scene, your very light areas you get 4 to 7 there within an 8 minute response. So
while it’s better to be able to get someone there than not at all, there are some areas particularly in the
southwest part of the City where coverage is pretty light as far as the number of fire fighters you can get
there.

Lastly, | am going to cover some of the Department’s performance and this is, again, NFPA 1710, in New
Hampshire when you call 911 all the calls go to the State Processing point to be then disseminated back to
the cities. And so what | am going to show you would be sort of going through the data is the impact that
that has on your performance. So this is the New Hampshire Emergency Communications Center. This is
how long it takes them to process calls. The Industry Standard is 60 seconds for fire and EMS processing
and overall at the State they are at 3 minutes, 11 seconds at the 90" percentile. So the reason we are
using percentiles and not averages; averages are subject to outliers and can really sway one direction or
another with a few outliers. The percentile performance is we are lining it up from the smallest to the
largest times and then taking 90% of that. So they will perform at 3 minutes, 11 seconds for 90% of the
calls and better and then the other 10% is going to be in excess of 3 minutes and 11 seconds.

Nashua, once they receive the call is processing the call within 1 minute and 3 seconds overall and so the
NFPA 1710 calls for 60 seconds, 12 21 which is the one that’s referenced from that is 64 seconds; so really
once the City gets this information, they are doing an outstanding job. But we’ve got to keep in mind for the
callers experiencing this, probably about 4 minutes has elapsed before that first unit is ever notified. Here is
our total call processing time; 3 minutes and 32 seconds from the time it goes to New Hampshire until the
time that Nashua is able to dispatch it. And then the next metric we are looking at is turnout time, this is we
have received the notification, and how long does it take for the firefighters to get into the unit and begin to
actually respond. So the standard is 60 seconds for EMS, 80 seconds for Fire and Special Operations. So
at 3 minutes and 13 seconds, there is some good improvement that could be done. Anecdotally if you
travel across the country, the fastest Departments we see are at about a minute and a half so really at 2 13
it is not that bad but it could be improved upon. And it’s not just the Fire Fighters being slow getting to the
vehicles, things like station design, the way the apparatus is staffed and a couple of other factors can effect
these turn out times.

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Next is travel time so this is from the time they get in the apparatus and begin responding until they get on
scene. Overall it is 4 minutes and 48 seconds, the standard calls for 4 minutes, so | mean overall this is
very good performance, you know, among the best we see. So | think this is a difficult measure to improve
upon because you can only get there just so fast but what it does show is that your current deployment
model is doing a pretty good job of meeting your demand. If in the future we begin to see this lag out and
there’s 5 minute travel time or 6 minutes, that would be something, again, to keep track of because what
that is showing you is, is there’s probably not enough units to service those calls or that the place where
they are occurring there’s not a station close enough to service that demand.

Here is a graphic of showing what your travel times look like overall just for a visual. So most of your
incident demand is happening downtown and downtown you have very good travel time where we are
seeing problems is between stations 3 and 4 down in the southeast and then north above the airport and
then along the western border towards the south where travel times are beginning to reg out, mostly due to
the location of the stations and the amount of travel they are doing to get there. Here’s response time
performance, I'll quickly breeze through a couple of these, this is turnout and travel. So 6 minutes, 47
seconds, again that’s really pretty good performance. Total response times, this is just for Nashua so when
you call 911 90% of the time or better, Nashua unit is going to arrive in 7 minutes and 15 seconds from the
time that the Nashua dispatch center receives the call. When you factor in the state piece now we are at 9
minutes, 45 seconds. And so for folks to wait 10 minutes or more for the first unit to arrive shouldn’t be a
surprise because we are picking up around 3 minutes just before Nashua ever has the opportunity to do
anything with the call to begin with. And so with that, I’ll go ahead and turn it over to Mary-Ellen so she can
present the summaries of the plan findings and cover the rest of the report. Mary-Ellen?

Ms. Harper

Thank you, Stuart. Good evening. | am going to try to move through this; it is a 175 page Master Plan, |
want to be respectful of your time; | am going to hit the major points but certainly would be happy to take
any questions about anything in the report when we are done. The first thing that | would like to say is that
it was absolutely a pleasure to work with Nashua Fire Rescue. We do these projects all over the country
and the level of engagement and the people that had thoughtful questions and were just willing to be part of
a process for betterment of the system — you guys are second to none. You really have a good group of
people that are doing good work and we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that.

At the end of the day, Nashua is a very proud and very traditional New England Fire Department.
Operationally, you are meeting most of the standards through the Provision of Fire Rescue Services. But as
Stuart said a little while ago, that’s right here and right now and today. You are going to need to monitor
that going forward. You are a growing community, the demand for services is changing, the places people
live and the kind of services they need is changing. You are going to need to monitor that going forward to
make sure that what you have is still adequate because all indications are that at some point in the not-too-
distant future you are going to need to add additional resources in the system just to maintain the service
that you are giving right now.

That said, right now here and today, there are quite a few administrative and support functions that are
woefully understaffed and we are going to spend a little time just showing you what those areas are and
where there is absolutely room for improvement. The other thing I’d like to get on your radar is that the
facilities for the Fire Department are absolutely going to require a financial investment in the very near
future and we will talk about those as well.

So the first thing we want to talk about is Community Risk Reduction. Community Risk Reduction which
include fire prevention but is above and beyond fire prevention. It’s not just fires, it is medical calls and
other types of emergencies, it is really the most vital non-emergency function in the fire service. And the
reason for that is the safest emergency is the one that is prevented. So we can do anything as a community
to help our residents not to get hurt, not to get injured, not to have property damage; that’s what we owe
them. We owe them the opportunity to try to prevent those damages before they happen. And we can do
that in 5 major ways.

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Emergency Response obviously is one of them. If something happens that you respond and try to fix it. But
on the front end, there’s plenty of opportunities with educating the public how to not get themselves in
trouble, how to not cause problems. Engineering — things that we can do to build buildings safer so that
when things do happen they are not as catastrophic. And then Code Enforcement and Economic
Incentives, you can always reach somebody with Economic Incentives and having Codes and building
procedures are absolutely a way that you are going to want to enforce things to keep them going. So with
that in mind, we looked at the Nashua Fire Marshall’s Division. They are primarily charged with the
managing of this. Quite honestly, this Division is challenged in many different ways. They have coverage
gaps within the amount of staffing they have and the hours they can cover. The have a lack of ability to
perform inspections just because they don’t have the staff that is required to deal with the workload that is
on their plate. Staffing in general is a challenge at a Division where people promote in and then promote
out; workload because you are a vibrant city, you are growing and moving forward things are happening
which is a wonderful thing. But for every building that comes in there’s plan reviews and inspections that
happen in each division so all of this good work that’s happening is creating additional work for this already
overburdened area. And then, obviously, funding is a challenge; they need additional staff but that comes
with a price.

At the present time, the Fire Marshall’s Division here in Nashua is staffed by an Administrator, a Fire
Marshall and two Inspectors. So there’s somebody giving administrative support, the Fire Marshall is in
charge and there’s two inspectors who are helping to do investigations. During the year 2019 they did
3,170 inspections and/or investigative activities. The Fire Marshall and the two inspectors conducted an
average of more than 1,000 activities each; 5 per work day. Just consider, you know, an 8 hour work day
for the normal person, everything they do requires significant documentation. So they are not only out there
inspecting, they have to come and write reports and look at codes and look thing up. They are really
working at a very fast pace to try to get as much done as they are actually getting done. In addition to all of
that plan review is required for all fire protection systems, new construction — that is required by the New
Hampshire State Code. And in 2019 there were an additional 1,200 and those had to happen on top of all
the other work that was in that office.

So what does that mean? What that means is when we look at your office right now, it is staffed Monday
through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. There’s no on-call coverage for after-business hours, so if we
are outside of those hours, there’s nobody assigned or available that can automatically help with those
issues. What happens after hours is that they go look for somebody and about 50% of the time they can
find somebody that can help with those things after hours. The other 50% of the time, whatever the issue
is, complaint, code enforcement, investigation they are not followed up on until the next day because
there’s just nobody there to deal with it. So that’s a gap in coverage that you should be aware of and when
we are looking for places that we can improve, having the ability to hire people, put them on call or make
them otherwise available would really go a long way to providing more consistent coverage to the
community. But with the number of people you have now, they can’t work 24/7, they are already
overwhelmed, we can’t put them in on nights and weekends, we need to find a way to kind of spread that
workload out.

Beyond that, the current staffing does not allow for regular inspections to be completed at your target
hazards. And target hazards are places where there is a significant life safety issues; there’s hazardous
materials, there’s other things that make that something more dangerous than the areas around them;
things like apartment complexes, multi-family dwellings. Ideally you want to do regular inspections, you
want to make sure that those places are safe and if something were to happen that we can mitigate that
with as little risk to life safety as possible. Nashua just does not have the capacity to do that right now
because that office is just not staffed to that ability. Right now, these places are only being inspected if
somebody calls and makes a complaint because that is the best they can do.

So when we look at Community Risk Reduction here in Nashua we have a couple of recommendations.
The first one is that you really need a formal Community Risk Reduction Program and it needs to be
reinstituted in tandem with the Public Educator that was eliminated back in 2006. There are so many

Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 8

opportunities to help people prevent things from happening, somebody needs to be assigned to that
function and back in 2006 and before, you had somebody that was charged with that responsibility but
budget constraints made that position go away and that position just never got picked up anywhere else.
So right now, there’s not an established Fire Prevention or Community Risk Reduction Program in place.
The Firefighters do the best they can day to day, if something comes up they try to deal with it. The Fire
Marshall gets a request for something they'll do it, but there’s not any proactive plan that says, “Look, these
are the risks in Nashua and these are the ways that we are going to try to deal with that”.

As we went through the process, we identified some areas that were just blatant to us that are a fantastic
opportunity for Community Risk Reduction. The first one is disabilities, wnen we looked at your population
right now, you’ve got 8,922 of your households, which is about 24%, have 1 or more members with a
disability living at that home. And we understand that people with disabilities have more difficulty getting
themselves out of emergency situations and that they are more difficult to protect so the best thing that we
can do is on the front end provide education; be aware of where they are, find out how we can help and
make sure they are aware of how they can help themselves. So that is a fantastic opportunity to create
specific messages and educational programs for disabled people and the people that live with so that they
can be the first people to help those people before the Fire Department arrives.

Another one that is really, kind of came out to us, is that your population has been growing and changing
and it has been doing that for a while but when we stop and look now where you are currently in Nashua,
21.7% of your population speaks a language other than English which is really important to know when you
have got (audio cuts out) to know that almost a quarter of your population doesn’t speak English we should
be creating messaging opportunities in the languages that they do speak so that (audio cuts out) learn
these lessons in their native language. And if we are not doing that, we are missing before we even start
these programs, almost a quarter of your population. So it is important to be sensitive to what is in the
community, who is in the community, what their needs are, and how we can meet them in a way that meets
their needs.

So with that, when we look at industry standards and best practices, NFPA 1730 is what we would look at
and that talks about staffing levels for inspectors and Fire Marshalls. The present staffing level does not
allow for the regular inspections that they recommend and the only way you are going to be able to do that
is to add additional people to that office. | would tell you, you are probably, when we look at the numbers to
use 3: if we could get 1 or 2 in there now it would still be a huge step forward but that’s the kind of thing we
want to plan for. We all understand that these things require money and that money requires planning;
start small, add 1 a year, build up to it, knowing though that as you are adding people to this process to try
to balance it out, your community is still growing, so not only are you going to be adding people but you
may need to add more people to meet that future need that is still coming forward.

Beyond that, there may be other ways to look at it, ways such as plan review component as part of the
workload in that office. The problem with line firefighters is they promote in, they promote out; some stay
for a while, some don’t want to be there. So there’s a level of change that is going on within that area. A
civilian plans reviewer is somebody who is hired to come in and just perform that function and not have an
opportunity to leave or not promote to the line might give you the opportunity to create stability, somebody
that was consistently looking at all of the new plans coming in making sure they were held to the same
standard and was there for a number of years to create a significant consistent baseline. So that may be
an opportunity where you can remove some of the work from the other Fire Marshalls and inspectors, give
somebody else their job of civilian planning reviewer, create some stability in that office and still be able to
perform more Community Risk Reduction and inspection opportunities.

So the next big area we wanted to hit on was the Facilities within Nashua Fire Rescue. You have 6 fire
stations, plus you have a fire alarm headquarter building and a training facility with the burn building. What
we did is we came through on this process, is we met with the firefighters and spoke with them but we also
visited all the fire stations. And we created a rating system where every building was rated as excellent,
good, fair, or poor. Fair and poor obviously being the areas you should be aware of. A “fair building is one
that is structurally sound but there are some non-structural defects, the interior has got wear and tear, there

Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 9

are some mechanical systems that are working but probably need some work on them. And the important
part here is the building design and construction may not match the building’s purposes. So that happens
especially in New England, you’ve got a lot of buildings that were built many, many years ago. The role of
the Fire Department has changed in the last 100 years. What we do has changed and in many cases
where the people in our community live has changed. So we may have buildings that were built many
years ago that may not be necessarily in the best locations now. So | say that because when we look at
these buildings and they are getting older, they are going to have additional needs for maintenance and the
question now becomes do we repair them or do we look at relocating them?

So a “fair” building is one of those that you can start looking at; when we got the “poor” area, we’ve already
passed the time that we should have taken some action and these are areas we need to address pretty
quickly. (No audio).

Alderman Clemons

| think you are on mute.

Ms. Harper

How about now?
Alderman Clemons

Now you’re good.

Ms. Harper

OK. When we look at some of these buildings, for instance, the Amherst Street Station, Station 1, you
know, turn out times, things where we are looking at how quickly a firefighter can get into a fire truck and
respond, these buildings were built in a different time and they weren’t necessarily built with that in mind.
So newer facilities are specifically designed with ease of access to get the firefighters out to the trucks and
out the door as quickly to respond. There are ways we can improve their turnout times by creating
environments that are specifically set up for that. So as we are looking at making changes, those are the
kinds of things we want to keep in mind. So Station 1 should definitely be on the radar, it is a “fair” building,
it is not in “poor” condition yet but “fair’ means you’ve got to start planning because you are going to be ina
poor situation very quickly if you don’t plan to address it sooner than later.

When we look at your station 2 it was built in 1998 it is in good condition, it is good for now, but again things
change and life happens and buildings get older as we move forward and you are going to need a plan, not
necessarily imminently but a little bit further out just to maintain that building and keep it in good working
order. The next one that was a concern was Station 3 on Spit Brook Road which is also in fair condition.
The building was built in 1977, it has got some antiquated facilities and there are absolutely areas that need
to be addressed sooner than later in that building. Station 4 built in 2005 is also in good condition, but
again, it is already more than 15 years old so keeping in mind while it is good today, you are going to need
to do work in the near future to keep it in good condition. Looking out at Station 5, that’s another one that is
in fair condition, it was built in 1961, it is an older building. It definitely has got some facility systems that
need to be updated and/or renovated and the same goes for Station 6 on Conant Road, it’s now in fair
condition. Fire Alarm Headquarters is good and your training facility is brand new, it is in absolute excellent
condition.

So what | want to summarize is the facilities and the message I’d like to leave you with is that the
infrastructure is going to require significant financial investment in the coming years. So we tell you that
now so you can plan and start coming up with a plan that your community can afford and the build into the
overall plan for your City. Four of your six fire stations are more than 40 years old, they are in fair
condition, they are going to need work. Many of these stations have outlived their useful life, some are no

Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 10

longer located in the optimal locations and as you look through the service part of this report, you are going
to see which stations are still in ideal locations and probably need to renovated and there’s some stations
that it might make sense just to rebuild in a different location. So that’s part of this planning process, is to
have those discussions now and see how it fits into your overall capital plan and to make decisions that will
get you to where you need to be when it is time to be there.

So with a that in mind, as you are looking at these stations and talking about renovations and relocations,
some of the things that you really just want to think about building into stations now that may not have been
done back when some of the stations were built are things like drive through bays. You want the ability for
the firefighters to drive in forward and to leave forward. A lot of our accidents happen when you are
backing up so right now you have drive through bays in some of the stations, the problem is you have so
many apparatus, they can’t drive through because there’s things in the way. So even though you have
drive through bays, you are not getting the benefits of it and you are still requiring people to back up.
Backing up is dangerous, accidents happen, people get hurt, and if we can avoid backing up a large fire
apparatus, it is always a better idea to do that.

Another issue is cancer in the fire service. Your turnout gear goes into fires with firefighters, they are
washing it, they are making every effort they can but at the end of the day there is still going to be a
process of off gassing following a fire where the gas is coming off of the turnout gear and now the firefighter
is in that fire station or exposed to that off gas that happened in a fire long after the fire is over. So modern
practices are to create well ventilated, separate rooms where turn out gear is stored so that as that process
happens, those contaminants are removed and the firefighters aren’t there breathing it again. So these are
all things that you would want to consider as you are making renovations and rebuilding fire stations in the
future. All of that helps for the safety of your firefighters.

So just to kind of summarize the process we went through, we had 22 virtual and in-person interviews,
meetings and facility tours as part of this process. We tried not to do this in a vacuum, the pandemic
certainly gave us some challenges but we wanted to talk to anybody that would talk to us. We wanted to
hear what was going on and see how your system was working. Knowing that we couldn’t meet with
everybody in person or virtually, we also did a 20 question on-line survey of the Nashua firefighter’s
numbers in the community of the fire service. And the reason for that was we wanted to give them an
opportunity to have an anonymous chance to give their input, their thoughts and to give their ratings. So |
will tell you, we had some pretty good responses out of that 20 question on-line service for the fire
department. 94 members of the department did complete the survey which is about 54% of your members.
So it is considered representative of the majority of the Fire Department.

What those surveys told us was very much the same as what we heard during all of the meetings with the
fire fighters in the stations. First and foremost, your firefighters are proud to be members of Nashua Fire
Rescue. They are proud to be part of this organization, they are proud of the work that they do, they are
proud to serve the City, they are just very proud of the work they do. | think that’s important because there
is a level of pride that comes with that that you can’t create, it just happens from within and that is a tribute
to you for the resources that the Chiefs and the Aldermen have provided as far as training and equipment
and their ability to do their job well. And they are proud of that, so kudos to all of you for being part of that
process.

Beyond that, they all felt that the people that make up the Department are by far the Department’s biggest
strength. They talked about the number of people, the manpower, the aggressive firefighting, again they
are proud of the service they provide, they are proud of the level of training they have. They do a good job
and they are proud of it. So | think it’s important to recognize that. Because as we go through this process
there’s always room for improvement, but you have a lot of good things going and a lot of good people
doing that work and it is really important to give credit where credit is due. And that’s absolutely where they
good deeds are happening.

Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 11

So | am going to move to the next thing which is morale. Far and wide we heard in all the meetings and the
interviews showed us that there is a morale problem with Nashua Fire Rescue. Members felt very strongly
that communication or lack thereof, was the biggest Department issue. People just weren’t getting
information they needed, it wasn’t consistent and that makes people uneasy, people want to know what to
expect, they want to have a level of expectation of where they sit in the system. If they don’t have that
information they get unsettled and that leads to bad morale. So there is a morale problem in Nashua Fire
Rescue; the good news it is absolutely fixable with a little bit of time and resources.

We did hear repeatedly throughout all of our meetings, members want to see a more consistent
accountability system with the Nashua Fire Rescue. They want to see Chief Officers holding members
accountable from the top down, they also wanted to see their own union holding their members
accountable from the bottom up. They felt by and large that not everybody was treated the same way in
certain circumstances and part of that is just the communication. There may be circumstances that required
different responses, there may be people that are being treated the same but they don’t have that
understanding because they don’t have the information. So some of that is creating more of a transparent
process, understanding that not every detail of every situation can be shared, but there should be a
baseline expectation of what can be shared and people should know what they can understand here, again
knowing where they fall in that system and how they fit in.

The fifth big issue that came up was training and members across the board repeatedly identified that
training is truly one of the biggest weaknesses within Nashua Fire Rescue. We are going to talk about
some ways that that can be fixed, because it is absolutely fixable. So we gave you dozens of
recommendations and the important thing is that while all of those need to be addressed and looked at
going forward, you have to look at the morale, the communication, the accountability and the training before
any of the other things can matter. We need to do all of it but it is almost like triaging a patient, it doesn’t
matter if their big toe is broken, if you don’t get them breathing it is not going to matter. So the focus really
initially needs to be on your morale, your communication, your accountability and your firefighter training.

ESCI suggests the most effective way and the immediate way to address all of these issues is really to look
at restructuring the Administrative Division to include an Assistant Chief of Uniform Professional Standards.
And this Chief would report to the Chief of the Department. And the reason we recommend this are that
they would have the ability to investigate all the internal affairs type activities. So right now, that’s additional
work on top of the current Chief and Assistant Chief. And they have got their plates full. You’ve got a very
lean staff administrative division, they are trying to do a whole multitude of things and when all of these
internal affairs things come in it is just more work on top of what they are doing and there are only so many
hours in the day. So now they’ve got to make decisions about what are they going to do and what are they
not going to do to get those things done. So if we could create that third position and take all of those
internal affairs issues off of their plates, what we are creating is that level of consistency that the members
are looking for. We have one point of contact between the Fire Department and Human Resources, one
person that is addressing it, one person that Knows past practice, one person that is making sure that there
is a consistent metric that is being applied across the Board.

This position could also help develop the Management and Communications Plan. You know, again,
people want to know, especially in this day and age, where they fit in the system, what to expect, what is
going to happen and that is a critical weakness right now. You’ve got those two people — the Chief and the
Assistant Chief — they are trying to get as much done as they can during the day. They don’t have
(inaudible) to sit down and have a planned out mitigations program where they can go ahead and get that
information out to them. What | would tell you is that issue is going to continue to fester, unless we can find
a way to deal with it and get that information out to them.

The other big issue is the recruitment of new firefighters. Right now the Training & Safety Division is
spending a significant amount of time recruiting and vetting out new firefighters and getting them on line.
Honestly they have bigger issues and the bigger issue really should be focusing on training your
firefighters. You should be getting these trained instructors out there training your firefighters and perhaps
reassigning this recruitment duty to this Assistant Chief who can then make sure that that happens but

Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 12

allow the Training Division to focus their efforts on training the firefighters which would address the issue of
the training deficiency that was brought up by the membership.

And then again the training program in general, if we put this Assistant Chief over that and take off the
workload from recruitment and retention, now we have somebody that is going to manage the training and
safety division, help them achieve SMART goals that are smart, measurable, reasonable and will be done
in an appropriate amount of time and we have accountability there. So the person is overseeing it, we’ve
taken some workload off the Training Division and now the Training Division can be focused in on really
getting firefighters trained to the level that they need to be.

Then the fifth issue is the professional development program. You know, you’ve got people moving up
through the ranks, but they are taking classes here and there and there’s not a systematic program to move
people from where they are now to where they want to get. So we could create a formal career develoment
program and show people career paths, if you want to do this job, these are the programs you need to do.
If you want to do that job, this is what you need to do and give them something to look forward to in the
future. People want to see that there’s hope and that they are going to move up and that they can promote
and they want to know how to do that and how to prepare themselves for it.

So in summary the communication, the accountability, the training and the morale — those are your big
issues. | would tell you that in 2001 Municipal Resources Inc. came in and completed a similar
organizational assessment and at that time, they had the same results. They felt that the morale, the
communication and the accountability were issues. So here we are 20 years later and those issues are still
unresolved and not only are they unresolved but they are going to get worse if we don’t start doing
something to address them. And we need to put some resources towards giving you the people that can
focus their efforts on dealing with those issues specifically so that they don’t continue to fester and get
worse.

| guess the last thing | would review is, again, there is dozens of recommendations in this Master Plan. You
don’t have to like them all, you don’t have to do them all and that’s designed into the process. The most
important thing out of this is to agree that all of this is important and needs to be looked at and then to
move into the strategic planning process. And that’s what comes next ideally in a good situation. What you
want to see now is the strategic planning process is going to be your 1 to 3 year plan; the Master Plan was
just a look ahead. Now we looked at all the issues that we could see on the horizon for 15 years, but ideally
you would want to engage in strategic planning next and that is bringing the Nashua Stakeholders, through
all different levels of the organization and say, “OK out of all these recommendations what are our priorities
here in Nashua, what do we want to do and what do we want to do first”. And we want to see everybody
from elected officials to Chief Officers to new firefighters to get all of you in on the same page and say, “Ok
this is what we are going to do in the first year or the first three years” and to do that.

And | would tell you that if you don’t engage in that strategic planning process and you don’t make a plan of
how you are going to start addressing things, what often happens is these Master Plans become a report
on a shelf and that’s absolutely not what you want to do. You have a lot of people that were engaged in
their process and gave their opinion and were looking to see change happen and the best way to do that is
to bring them back and to do this strategic planning process to figure out where do you as an agency want
to start and what are you going to do.

In conclusion, your successful strategic planning process would get you an ability to systematically
implement the recommendations that are in this report in a way that is good for you and your stakeholders.
And with that, I’d open the floor for any questions?

President Wilshire

Thank you, Mary-Ellen, does anyone on this Board have questions? | don’t see any hands up.
Alderwoman Lu?