Burning his bridges
Interim Fire Chief Jack Piccinini, who retires in November, releases his own Fire Services report without the approval of the city council's Fire Services Ad Hoc committee
When the city council first announced a special city council meeting on the topic of fire services, most council watchers expected that we were about to see the long-awaited Fire Services Ad Hoc Report. But when the agenda appeared last Thursday, the report wasn’t included in the long list of supporting documents.
Turns out that Fire Chief Jack Piccinini turned in his own report on Friday—the day city offices are closed. Piccinini said he’d asked on Thursday to include the report in the published packet, but was told no. Instead, he released it on his own, sending a copy to all the city council members and all the members of the Fire Services Ad Hoc Committee, which (in addition to Piccinini) includes Mayor Neysa Hinton, Councilmember Jill McLewis, City Manager Larry McLaughlin, and City Clerk/Assistant City Manager.
According to Mayor Hinton, the ad hoc committee had some undisclosed disagreements with the report and had no time to meet and review it, so the city decided not to release the document in time for the meeting. (Interestingly, it was on the Fire Department section of the city website but has since been removed.)
In the absence of an agreed-upon report from the Fire Services Ad Hoc, the council might’ve simply cancelled the meeting, as they had an earlier fire services town hall, but they decided to go ahead with a special city council meeting to gather and respond to questions from the public.
Mayor Hinton led off the meeting with this introduction:
“Tonight, the purpose really is to be fully transparent. We want to hear from the community, and we want to present information and answer the questions to the best of our ability. Then the next steps will be from City Council on what direction that we want to move towards. And we don't expect that to happen tonight. But we do expect to get some feedback to know if this subcommittee [the Fire Services Ad Hoc] will be continuing its work in some way, shape or form or kind and in what direction they want to point.”
A profile of the department
Piccinini, who is retiring as interim fire chief in November, then took to the podium to present a profile of the Sebastopol Fire Department and a list of its challenges and opportunities.
“We have been a volunteer fire department since 1902,” he said. “And we continue to be near 100% volunteer firefighters, which is extremely unusual anywhere in the state of California…We do have a career fire chief and two fire engineer positions that are full time … and a senior administrative assistant that works half time for the fire department and half of her time in the building department. And we have about 30 volunteers.”
He noted that, in the last year, the number of volunteers had jumped from 18 to 30. Though these individuals are technically volunteers, they are partially compensated with stipends and payments for a variety of different activities.
Piccinini said that the Sebastopol Fire Department, which serves the town’s 7,500 residents, responds to over 1,325 calls for service per year. Sixty-five percent of those are medical emergencies. They also respond to fire calls, accidents, and outside agency fires—as well as (who knew?) being the local regional resource for large animal rescues and building collapse rescue operations. They also have a rescue boat and do water rescues.
He noted that while the Fire Department makes up 15% of the Sebastopol city budget; in most towns of this size, the fire department accounts for 20% of the budget.
Challenges and opportunities
In terms of the department challenges, the need for a station house upgrade topped the list.
“The fire station was built in 1972,” Piccinini said. “It lacks ADA compliance, it lacks gendered accommodations, lacks 24-hour staffing accommodations. The training room needs upgrades and modernization, and we just simply need more room for all the equipment that we have in the station.”
Estimates for these upgrades range from two million to five million dollars (with $100,000 for the architectural design), though modular units can be had for considerably less, roughly $150,000.
Equally important is the matter of staff coverage. Despite the valiant efforts of volunteers, Piccinini said, “The staffing model is not designed for 1,300-plus calls a year. That is the simple reality and through no fault of our volunteers. They're sometimes just not available for a variety of reasons … And therefore unfortunately we've had emergency responses where the response times exceeded 10 minutes; one as high as 17 minutes is reported in a recent report. And on rare occasions, the fire truck was not able to get out the door to respond to an emergency.”
The city is looking at two options: 24-hour coverage and 16-hour coverage. Piccinini clearly prefers the former, and councilmember Stephen Zollman called him out for not including any analysis of the 16-hour coverage option in his report.
There was some good news when it came to equipment: the department is currently using 30-year-old fire trucks, but two of these will be replaced with new models over the next two years. The department has also won several grants recently that allowed it to replace some of its older equipment.
Throughout the evening, there were frequent mentions of the Fire Prevention and Response tax measure that will appear on the March 2024 ballot. If it passes, this sales tax measure is expected to raise $60 million countywide, of which Sebastopol would get $1 million. Even with this measure however, Piccinini noted that an additional local tax would be needed to cover 24/7 staffing and capital improvements.
Understanding consolidation and other options
Perhaps the most significant opportunity for the fire department, at least in the minds of several city council members, is the question of whether the department should combine with a neighboring fire district to share personnel and services and take advantage of economies of scale.
The volunteers of the Sebastopol Fire Department have been pretty clear in their opposition to such a plan, but because of the potential savings, the possibility of consolidation is still very much on the table.
Mayor Hinton stepped back to the mic to discuss the process of consolidation.
“The first thing is to open what they call an MSR or a municipal services review with a neighboring fire district,” she said. “The potential cost of that is $10,000.”
She explained that the process would be overseen by LAFCO (Local Agency Formation Commission) and could take 24 to 28 months.
“The governance would no longer be through the city council,” she said. “It would be overseen by the fire district board, and those are elected positions.”
Sebastopol property owners would then have to pay the same parcel tax as the district with which it decides to consolidate.
This raises the question of which local fire district the city should combine with. For the last few years, Gold Ridge District seemed like the most likely partner. But Gold Ridge has radically expanded its reach, consolidating with the North Bay Fire Authority, and now covers 300 square miles, stretching from Marin to Fort Ross.
Instead, the much smaller Graton Fire District, with oversees just 26 square miles, seemed like the council’s preferred possibility at Tuesday’s meeting. The parcel tax structure for both districts are complex, but both have a parcel tax of $250 a year for single family homes.
There are also options that fall short of full consolidation, including the following:
a limited contract for shared services with a neighboring district, in which the city and partnering district agree to share personnel, volunteers, and even equipment.
an administrative agreement with a neighboring district, in which the city and partnering district agree that the district will provide personnel coverage for the Sebastopol Fire Department, ranging from administrative services to fire chief.
a joint powers authority with a neighboring district, in which the city and partnering district agree to operate as a single unit, without giving up their legal identities. The City of Sonoma’s Fire Department and Sonoma Valley Fire operate under such an agreement, in which a third entity (the unelected JPA board) oversees joint operations.
Finally, the city could simply contract with another agency for full delivery of fire services, which would probably cost around $2.5 million a year.
In an emotional moment, Councilmember Diana Rich pleaded directly with the the numerous volunteer firefighters present at the meeting to go along with consolidation so that that they’d be governed not by the city council—whose opinions they didn’t seem to trust or respect—but by a district board of consisting mostly of former firefighters, who would better understand their concerns. Her voice cracked as she said this, and she seemed to be holding back tears.
At the end of the evening—after a long question and answer session with the public— the council decided to keep the Fire Services Ad Hoc going and directed it to move forward on multiple fronts, with a particular emphasis on exploring the three options above, as well as consolidation with a neighboring district.
Where does Chief Piccinini stand?
Chief Piccinini noted in an interview two days after the meeting that almost every person who spoke during the meeting’s Q&A expressed their opposition to consolidation and their support for an independent Sebastopol Fire Department. He said he was disappointed that the council gave short shrift to the option of keeping the fire department independent.
At the same time—and this may surprise some Fire Department supporters—Chief Piccinini said that he is not necessarily opposed to consolidation. He noted that he laid the foundations for the consolidation between the Windsor, Bennett Valley, and Rincon Valley fire departments, that ultimately, under Chief Heine’s leadership, became Sonoma County Fire Protection District.
“I'm not opposed to consolidation, especially when it makes sense for improved service, improved economy of scale, greater efficiencies, and that it is right for the community, that the community is informed and involved, that the volunteers are informed and involved early in the process,” he said. “That needs to happen way before a final decision that ‘Yes, we're going to move forward with consolidation’ should ever occur.”
At the meeting, he expressed it this way: “The path to success includes a lot of other steps so that we don't end up with a newspaper article down the road that says “Major push back on efforts to consolidate.” That's what we have got to prevent, and there is a very specific path to get us to that place.”
“Nobody should ever be surprised as we move forward in this process,” he continued. “Because if somebody is surprised, it’s a different emotion; it's an emotional event already, right? You're hearing that from the community and you heard that from the volunteers. But if we follow a process, then we can still have a place where there can be disagreement, but we're not adding the emotional component of ‘We're being surprised. This is being forced on us,’ which is a different emotion that is very difficult to manage and overcome. And you've got to make sure that that does not occur.”
Farewell to the Chief
Whether the city decides to consolidate its fire department or not, that decision will not happen during Piccinini’s tenure, which is coming to an end in November.
“I just don't want to be the chief anymore,” he said. “I’m super proud of what we have done internally in the department in terms of getting our volunteer program back to what it should be, the fact that we're buying a new engine, the fact that we've brought attention to the staffing issue, and that they [the city council] need to really start working on that.”
He regrets that the whole ad hoc process went so badly off track. He sees this as a failure.
Though he’s stepping down as chief, he said he’s not leaving the department.
“I'm going to continue to be a volunteer like I have been in Sebastopol for the last almost 50 years, and I will continue to lead this organization in whatever capacity that I'm allowed to. I will support the new Fire Chief any way I can. But I do want to go back to retirement. I don't want to do the 40 hours a week, day in, day out, putting up with ad hoc committees,” he said with a laugh. “But I'm not going anywhere.”
Chief Piccinini is a class act. He has been a devoted,selfless leader for years, and our town of Sebastopol owes him a huge dose of gratitude.
So too, should we be tipping our hats and sending much appreciation to all the volunteers who make us proud when we boast about our volunteer fire department.
Finally, great coverage of a difficult, complex and contentious issue. Nice job Laura.
I’m not sure who burned any bridges. Jack is one of the most respected fire chiefs in Sonoma County. I have worked besides Jack for 34 years and I never have had him make a bad decision or jeopardize firefighters. The lack of this city council to take its time and make solid decisions for the the taxpayers of Sebastopol concerning the fire department is appalling. Bringing on 16-24 staff may solve some issues but the lack of city funding has always been an issues. As for transparency the city council has always found ways not to fund the fire department and found it more important until we as firefighters brought to light some of the issues we are facing on a day to day scale. We as a fire department have saved this city an enormous amount of money over the years and to discard a model that works with a few adjustments and funding is fundamental wrong.