Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, good evening, and welcome to the Tuesday, March 10th, 2026 study session of the Olympia City Council.

For the record, we have a quorum with all council members present tonight.

So we have one business item for the study session this evening, and it is the Olympia Fire Department's community risk assessment and standards of cover briefing.

And we have uh our fire chief Matt Morris with Hillary Flowers, our deputy chief, and Stephanie Porter, who is our our business and operations specialist with the Olympia Fire Department.

And I'll turn it over to the Chief.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor, members of council.

Um, thank you very much for the opportunity to share some information with you this evening.

Um we're super excited to share the work that we've accomplished over the last 18 months or so on the standards to cover.

And um, so what I'd like to do tonight is I'm gonna kind of um offer a little bit of an introduction overview of kind of the the vision and intent.

Um, and then Chief Lowers and Stephanie are gonna walk you through some of the specific information and data and talk about our organizational performance and the kind of the strategic intent on how and the opportunities that we may have to improve some of that in performance, um, and then we'll kind of wrap it up after that.

Um we first came before council uh in mid-24 and presented our strategic plan.

Um talked about our mission and our vision and our and our shared beliefs as an organization and our intent to build community trust and to help build a safer, more vibrant community.

Um as a fire department, our greater purpose is simply just to take care of people in the community, whatever that may be, um, and that to meet them where they're at.

Um, and in order to do that, we need to ask a lot of questions and be familiar with and educate ourselves as to about our community and the needs of our community and the people in them.

Um so from that strategic plan and through the work plan, uh, we came back last year, mid-last year, and kind of presented to you the concept of a standards to cover.

Um, and so tonight um I'm excited to present to you a final draft of that.

Um everybody in this room is very familiar with a comprehensive plan, um, and this document really is a comprehensive plan of sorts specific to the fire service and fire services in the city of Olympia.

Um, it's data centric.

Um, the model follows that of the um centers for professional service or public safety excellence, which is the fire accreditation process.

Um, and so we use that process to kind of set the template for us.

Um the the overall arching intent and the vision of um this process for the Olympia Fire Department is to be able to be transparent in our community about this is who we are, this is our community, this is what we do for our community, and this is how well we do it.

Um here's the plan to get better, right?

And so um that's what we're excited to share with you.

Uh as we've gone through this process, we found things that we needed to improve on immediately.

One of that was um our data management, data gathering, data tools.

Um Stephanie Porter has been a fantastic asset to our organization.

Um, her job description is not specific to that of a data analyst, um, but she has a very strong ability and skills and passion for it, and we're very fortunate to have her on the team.

Um we had to lean into new data um collection software.

Um, one of those you'll see tonight is the is the Star Course system.

And in the midst of that, of course, then at the national level, they changed the national reporting software was changed on us, and so that delayed us probably by about six months in our process just because we had to implement that on the Nash from the national um requirements.

So having said all that, here we go.

So, why do we have a standards of cover?

It provides a platform for measurement improvement, continuous assessment, and clear expectations.

That's the bigger why.

Because if we're going to be an organization that um exists to take care of people, then we need to understand what the people need, and then we find us a solution to their needs, right?

So, how do we do that?

So, this document you have in front of you.

Um, if you want to follow along with me, because I'm sure it's it's a very long, lengthy document.

I'm not going to spend this evening reading it to you or um going word word for word on it.

Break it down into a couple big sections.

The first section is we we completed what's known as a comprehensive risk analysis of our community.

And so we looked at everything that we could find about the City of Olympia to help identify the risks in the community as it relates to public safety, the fire service, emergency medical services, and our core services.

As you look in at this document from page six to 49, really starts to identify and speak to those things.

I'll kind of pull your attention to uh page 24, which is about the service area boundaries.

And so we look at the boundaries of the City of Olympia's city boundaries, and then we have our fire station planning districts.

Four fire stations in the city of Olympia, each of those is a planning district.

That will be a theme throughout this evening as we talk, and as we go through the data, it'll talk about the different fire districts and the data and the performance as it relates to each of those.

If you kind of look beyond that, and then onto um page 29, I'll draw to you some of the data and in the GIS layering in the census data that we're able to collect and some things to consider as we look as our planning zones and we when we establish our our delivery um distribution system, the way we provide our resources to respond and mitigate risk in our community.

Um, a couple of things that stand out to us.

When we break it into our four response areas, the four stations, and if you look at on the graphs that you see on page 29, the percentage of seniors in each of our areas, station three, which is that's kind of that southeast direction of the city, um, 30% of the population in that area are over 60.

Kind of a significant statement, right?

So as you consider that, if you look at the diversity index, diversity index speaks to the likelihood that the people in that area are more diverse or less diverse than the county as a whole.

So it's kind of a comparison index.

Um you see, like areas like station two, station four, the west side, east side, their diversity is greater than that of than the rest of Thurston County.

So just to kind of give you some reference.

And as you kind of thumb through the next few pages, you see a lot of graphics for each of the response areas.

It's the same information for each response area, and we just tried to pull apart as much dependable, reliable, defendable information that we could to identify any gaps in equity and any gaps in service as it relates to the community that we serve.

Um that drives us to next, then from there is we start talking about what are our core services.

So currently on the City of Olympia Fire Department has core services, fire suppression, emergency medical services are obviously the two big ones, wildland fire, technical rescue calls, and then marine shipboard.