Finance Committee Page 3
January 4, 2017
vestibule where one door is on the inside and one is on the outside but their buildings are secure. All of their
individuals have KeyFobs that an individual can get into the apparatus floor but cannot go anywhere else in
their buildings. From day one that was one of my concerns for our civilian staff and that’s the primary reason
why when we met with the Mayor | said we will do what we can do to help but we have civilian staff that were
not hired to do this job and they are not trained to handle this type of situation and | don’t think it’s fair to put
them in that predicament. Low and behold we have had six incidents at headquarters that have become very
disruptive for the staff. Not everyone follows directions and goes to the sign out front and they walk right in,
unabated into fire headquarters. It’s not a good situation. | had conversations with each one of our civilian
staff and explained to them that we care and we don’t want you to be exposed to this and that our SOP deals
directly and speaks directly to them as to their level of engagement or non-engagement that we expect from
them but unfortunately at this point we’ve had six incidents at headquarters and yesterday we had one at the
Fire Marshall’s office. We have sensitive personnel files and other sensitive city property and probably more
so at Lake Street because they do a lot of counter interactions with contractors and people in the business
community so we are trying to not cloud that experience. The staff is understanding but is very hopeful that it
is coming and that is how we sold it to them. There are many occasions where the chief or | may be at a
meeting and our two admins at headquarters are the only ones on that side of the building and it’s the same
thing at Lake Street. Hind sight being 20/20 we probably should have built these buildings a little different
because they can’t physically see someone until they walk into their space.
Alderman Cookson
Thank you for that explanation. Could you remind us, is the Safe Haven Program in Nashua, can they go to
any fire station? Is it just these two that we mentioned this evening that it’s not visible to your staff when
someone enters So it’s out of concern for their safety?
Assistant Chief Rhodes
It’s out of concern for their safety and because those are the only two locations where we have civilian staff as
well as the confidential documents that exist in each of those buildings.
Alderman Cookson
Mayor, when you introduced this program | thought that there was a statement that may have been made
during one of your opening comments at a Board of Aldermen meeting and | think it was in either November or
December and we had talked about the implementation of it and there was not going to be any additional cost
to run this program and then we came out and put aside $20,000 for AMR and Keystone to handle the
transportation costs and now we’ve got $44,000 worth of equipment to our fire houses. There is a cost to this
and whether it was known from day one but we have certainly modeled it after Manchester and | would have
assumed that because we modeled it after Manchester that we would be able to foresee some of these
expenses so | am having a really hard time swallowing the fact that from no cost it is now probably close to
$60,000 or $70,000. Is it a worthwhile program? Absolutely but | sort of feel like our hands are tied behind
our backs at this point because if we had known this up front we could have planned for it and done what we
needed to and now instead of a ready, aim, fire type of scenario we’ve already fired the gun and now we have
to go back and retrofit everything to make it the way it should have been.
Mayor Donchess
| think what happened is that we had been looking at the Manchester program for quite some time but we
didn’t have all of the tools that we needed to implement it, specifically the ability to have someone respond to
the fire station and then take the person to a place where the fire staff wouldn't have to be dealing with them
for more than 10 or 15 minutes and where they could be taking care of and directed to appropriate treatment.
Then in September and October we had seven fatalities in each of those months so | went up to Manchester
and met with Stephanie Bergeron of Serenity Place and | said we don’t have the ability at the moment to
respond immediately to the fire stations. If we do the program in Nashua can you come and pick the people
