All right, everyone, let's get settled in and we'll get the meeting started.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, made the baby cry, I think.

All right, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the public safety committee meeting for Tuesday, September first.

This is the approval of the June second, twenty twenty-six minutes.

Do I have a motion?

Okay, motion second.

Any changes, amendments to it?

All in favor, say aye.

Next up, uh, we have the fire department for Worth Lab telling us about recommended changes to the fire and EMS fees.

If you want to start off with that.

I'm here for the fire and EMS update and to talk about some proposed fees that we have for the FY twenty-seven budget.

We'll start off with just a couple overview of where EMS is today, and then we'll get into the fee changes that we propose.

Over the last year, this last fiscal year uh for hiring and retention.

We have uh hired 114 EMTs and paramedics through two recruit classes.

Our pass rates have been very high in those classes, 99 and 95 percent respectively.

Uh the national average is only 65 to 75 percent.

Uh Fort Worth Fire Department has a long history of exceeding that uh average.

Our attrition rate is currently 20 percent.

We we lost 85 employees in that same time that we hired, 114.

That number is higher than we would like it to be.

That's the same number uh approximately that was at Medstar across a uh calendar or fiscal year.

Uh we are taking steps to improve retention.

Uh we're we're currently working with city management to uh through the collective bargaining agreement and hopefully have some other strategies in place to uh retain employees.

One of those is doing our own in-house paramedic school.

We're partnering with uh Tarrant County College and plan to start that in January.

So some of our EMTs will be able to attend that full time across nine or ten months.

Uh so basically grow our own paramedics and uh and keep them employed.

So that 85 employees, you know, it really comes out to about seven to eight people a month, and about three and a half of those are paramedics that we're losing.

There is a paramedic shortage nationally, so we really want to place emphasis on that.

Uh and the vast majority of those are going to dual role departments, other uh dual role fire departments in either a single role capacity or going on to be firefighter EMTs and paramedics.

So we are cognizant of that, and we are taking steps to improve our retention in those areas.

With that, uh, we're gonna start recruiting again in the fall.

We have our final uh group from the last uh tests we gave this current fiscal year starting in October.

We will have 25 EMT candidates and we will have eight lateral uh paramedic candidates start October 1.

That'll finish up all of those lists, and then throughout the fall, we will go into a recruiting campaign.

Uh Fort Worth is uh is once again we'll be able to host the state EMS conference here at our convention center in November, close to Thanksgiving, so we always do a lot of recruitment there, and then we're planning a hiring test uh shortly after that in January to kick off all of our FY27 classes.

It costs us about 2.3 million dollars per recruit class of 50 persons to hire those, and we're planning for two recruit classes in FY27.

Ideally, if we can get our retention numbers up, we can get that down to one recruit class a year, which is currently what we do for firefighters through their attrition, which is mostly retirement.

Sworn staff where we are today, even with those 114 and those leaving uh as of July 1st.

This we were doing this as a is a quarterly closeout uh of our 543 sworn positions.

We have 507 of those filled, so we're about 93 percent staffed.

That number's gone up slightly since July 1st.

We have about 45 openings, but we are starting those approximately 33 people October 1st to offset some of that to buy us a little bit of time to we can do the recruiting in the fall and get to the tests in January and then start the FY27 uh hiring and recruitment.

Our system performance uh we primarily look at travel times and unit hour utilization, which is how busy a crew is during their their shift.

Uh the goal is to be less than 50% unit hour utilization.

Uh Medstar, when they were running the uh EMS service, they were a high utilized utility utilization system.

They were up around 67 or 70 percent.

We wanted to get that number down.

We believe that contributes to some of the attrition too uh and and burnout within that.

Our goal is to be less than 50 percent at the end of quarter three for FY26.

We were at 36 percent.

So we're still hovering around that 36 to 40 percent for unit hour utilization.

We did go to 24 hour shifts, which I'll talk about in just a second, to make better use of our limited personnel.

So because they're working a longer shift, we also want to keep that utilization down uh so that we don't have any medical errors or any problems with them being excessively tired while performing life saving care.

So uh we try to keep that in if we can keep that in that 35% range is where we're looking at.

And you see that that sharp drop there is when we went to the 2448 shift.

So because we had limited people, uh, by putting them on a similar shift to what our firefighters were working with 24 on, 48 off.

We were better able to make use of our limited people.

They have some more built-in overtime, but that not only dropped our utilization, but it also dropped our our travel times.