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.
