Finance Committee - 11/20/2019 Page 6
Alderman Laws
| just want to be clear that | appreciate everything that you do in spite of the fact that several of your employees
are best friends of mine. Thank you and | am sure everyone in Nashua really appreciates the services you
guys provide. It’s wonderful.
Chairman O’Brien
If | may, God I’ve been around a long time, this will be third report that I’ve witnessed within the Fire
Department. However since the inception of the first and definitely since the second, the Fire Department has
accepted more responsibilities and that has taken some of the attention, | speak mostly 20, 30 years ago,
nobody really thought of the HazMat situation, and yet we have an excellent Hazmat team in the City that gets
utilized. And at that time they didn’t take into dive team, yet we are surrounded by water, with two major rivers
within our community and working with our friends on the Police Department too.
So there are things looking at the future growth that needs to be taken into account. The Fire Service has a
tradition of constantly reinventing itself. You know a couple years ago, one never thought of the concept of
Safe Stations, yet today it has become part of the routine for the firefighters. At one time we basically didn’t go
for a kid who fell out of the tree and broke his arm, but today now everybody is pretty much trained in life
support. So it is constantly revolving and | am in favor of this because to have a modern department you are
going to need to look at the future and see what the needs of this community are going to be. It is almost
$50,000.00 but it came out of a budget if | remember, like Alderwoman Kelly said. | think it would definitely
help us as we look into the future needs of the City as far as our Fire Department and improve the services.
Alderwoman Kelly
Thank you. | am going to support this; | think that the report is going to be something that will really help us.
The word you used when you were chatting just now was “plan”. So to Alderman Laws’ point, | appreciate
what we are going to get out of this, but | imagine there will be a plan to sort of phase in the things that we
hear from this report?
Chief Rhodes
Yes thank you for that question absolutely. This is not an all or nothing report. This will be, we will have
options. And at the end of the day it comes down to the members who sit in this room to decide how we are
going to fund public safety, more importantly in this case fire protection and emergency services to what level?
So again what | think it is going to do, it is going to equip you with the knowledge, factual knowledge moving
forward to make informed decisions for the community.
Alderwoman Kelly
So the other question | had was in regards to how we plan for this report in the future. So it’s been 20 years
since we did one, | imagine we probably don’t want to wait another 20 years for the next one. So are you guys
thinking about strategically how consistently we can do this plan so that we don’t get 20 years behind?
Chief Rhodes
So this is the first phase of this, yes. This is a kind of 0 to 10 year plan and hopefully after this plan, then we
work on a strategic plan and we kind of go through this and figure out what are the priorities of this and then
the strategic plan will be that 1 to 3 years, how do we get there. And how do we get there in a planned,
measured, controlled fashion?
Alderwoman Kelly
So just to clarify, you are thinking we do the strategic planning and at most we would do this again in 10 years?
