The City Council held a study session covering three major public agenda items: an update on the Rochester Fire Department, the future of Mayo Field, and a recap of the 2026 legislative session. Two closed sessions followed the public portion.
Note: The transcript header says "June 8th" but the provided date is June 9, 2026. This discrepancy is noted.
Okay. Okay, folks, we are going to start our uh June 8th City Council study session. We have uh three on our public agenda. We have the 2026 fire department update, uh mail field update, and then we have a 2026 legislative session update. And then we will have two closed sessions uh after we uh recess from here. So with that, I am going to turn it over to Chief Poe, who's going to talk about the fire department and uh things that are happening there. All right. Well, good afternoon. Uh, thank you all for the time. Really appreciate it. So at your request or from earlier this spring, uh we wanted to give you guys an update on overall happenings in the fire department as well as the progress of our current strategic plan. So we're gonna take some time, we're gonna talk about a key accomplishments uh for the department for the year, uh, updates to that strategic plan, uh, overview of current operations and staffing staffing considerations, and then gonna give you a uh preview for a request to submit a FEMA Safer grant, uh, which will be coming to you more than likely next week at the regular council meeting. Um so some big things that that happened this year. One is we added a second battalion chief per shift. Um, that was one of the to-do items from the legacy strategic plan. Uh we were able to accomplish this at a zero tax levy increase by repurposing some existing positions within the organization that were unfilled. Um secondly, uh improve technology and related initiatives for electronic documentation. Um, so being an outside chief, putting fresh eyes on our operations and our data. A little surprised that maybe a lack of consistent data reporting over the years. So investing in our our staff and making sure they understand the importance of kind of telling our story so that I can come to you with uh requests when warranted and paint a picture as to why that's necessary. Um emphasis this year on uh enhanced training, uh some changes in our training division, um, some really good opportunities as far as like joint training with our our neighbors and partners. Uh we've got an upcoming full-scale exercise for active shooter countywide, uh at one of the local high schools. Um metrics and deployment uh review. So we brought in an outside contractor that we'll talk about in a bit, uh known as Fitchen Associates, to put eyes on our data and get a third-party opinion about how we're operating and how we stack up against different national standards, and we'll talk quite a bit about that. And then um finally, a big emphasis this year on uh modernizing our policies. Um we want to make sure that as we ask more and more of our firefighters that they know what the what the playing field looks like, uh, and they're playing from a good playbook. Um so we've implemented or we are currently implementing uh a product called Luxapole. It's one of the largest uh vendors for public safety policy in the nation. Um our place currently use Luxapole Fire used to be a Luxible customer back in the day. Uh that project never materialized 20 some years ago, so we kind of dusted the the cobwebs off of it, and we're uh implementing with modern policies and rolling that out to the entire organization. Um so, like I mentioned earlier, Fitchin Associates is a permanently brought in from the outside. They have clients in the fire EMS and public safety realm in all 50 50 states, nearly every Canadian province and 12 different countries. Um, and they've got some some bigger organizations across the uh across the nation. Uh so our goal with our end goal with them is to draft what's the one is a standard of cover. That's a very robust document that's used in the accreditation world. Uh it looks at all of your incident data, uh, your community risk, different trends, the growth of your city, and then looks at current deployment models and make sure that you're deploying your resources as as effectively as possible. Um that's gonna be probably another four to five months before we see that standard of cover document materialized, but we have gotten some draft documents from them that will share some highlights with you here throughout this report. Once that SOC at center standard of cover is done, we'll come back to you at a future study session and go through that in greater detail. We did ask them for some deliverables on the front end, and we told them some of our priorities from them is we wanted their analysis of our current station location of our current five stations. We wanted them to look at the proposed station six location to kind of verify that that that location makes sense for the way our city is growing. And then we also wanted their opinion as to the plan. The plan currently is to redeploy one of the two downtown engines to that sixth station once it's built, and wanted to like have them look at the impact of what that would be for the workload for our current apparatus downtown. So the good news is, in their opinion, all these things are viable. The current station locations work well. Assuming that you guys are comfortable with the current uh travel time to emergency scenes, and we'll talk quite a bit about that uh coming up. It is important to note, and we'll talk quite a bit about this later, that our current travel time to emergency scenes does not meet national standards. Uh, there are no national standards police. We won't get in trouble for that, but that's a policy decision that the city council and the fire chief get to make together. Um, but if you're comfortable with the current response and travel times, then our stations are in good locations as they sit. Uh, and also station six will help uh those residents in that neighborhood once that station is up and running, uh, meet national standard times.