Special Board of Aldermen 03-23-2021 Page 17
Alderwoman Kelly
If | could follow up?
President Wilshire
Yes.
Alderwoman Kelly
So | know there’s a large report to dive into and maybe you answered it in there, but what does a multi-
language program look like. Is that having a person, a translator, is it more translating documents. What
does that look like?
Ms. Harper
It could be all of those. If you dig into the risks and look at it and we have seen communities that hire multi-
lingual people to work in the office. It may be a matter of having somebody in your office work with
somebody on the outside that can translate fire prevention materials into other languages and disseminate
those in a way specific to areas that you know that they are going to be better received in a language other
than English. So it doesn’t have to be one size fits all. It could be a combination of all of those. Videos are
another great way to teach people lessons, you know, delivering them in their first language is always
easier lesson for them to learn than trying to translate it into a language that they predominantly speak.
Alderwoman Kelly
Thank you, | really appreciate that.
President Wilshire
Thank you. Alderman Harriott-Gathright.
Alderman Harriott-Gathright
My question was on the staffing and you call it the relief factor. | just wanted to make sure that you were
speaking that they would need like 25 full-time employees? Was that correct.
Mr. McCutcheon
| lost you a little bit on the front end so | just want to make sure | have the question correct. So you are
asking about the 1.25 relief factor and are those numbers correct. So there’s two ways to approach staffing
because people are going to take vacation time, they are going to call out sick and they are going to get
hurt at some point and be out on injury leave. So one option would be that we use overtime to fill all of
those positions and that’s pretty much you are doing now. The other option is that you calculate how much
are you spending in overtime and then you compare that to how much it would cost with salary and fringe
benefit of hiring enough folks to cover what your calculated daily absentee rate is.
And so 25% is kind of in the middle. There are Departments that are closer to maybe 20% and to be honest
with you there are a lot of Departments that are closer to 50%. But what that does is it provides enough
folks out there in the field so you are not constantly hiring overtime or pulling people across districts and
things of that nature. There are already people there in place, but then additionally that frees up folks for
things like better training, more concentration on those items because there’s a few more people in the
system. And either way isn’t necessarily right or wrong, but they are two different approaches that solve
the same problem.
