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Chair O'Krepki.

Seeing nobody moving at all, we will move on.

Uh to new business.

And actually I'd like to thank uh retired division chief Steve Suter, because he actually started the process before Jack took over this position about a little over a year ago.

So thank you for all the work that went into this.

Um we covered some of this in the January 9th City Council meeting.

Um but today we're kind of getting a little more finite into some of the details to present to uh the public safety subcommittee on uh on what we got out of the uh for all's agreement with Sonoma County Fire District.

So just some real quick high-level review and background.

Um the DHS director um they the through DHS through the set the county of Sonoma put forward the emergency medical services exclusive operating area agreement, RFP results and recommendation.

And as we go through, and I use the term EOA, I'm referring to the exclusive operating area one in Sonoma County, which is largely Santa Rosa, about 75% is Santa Rosa and includes Ronor Park, Sebastipool, and the unincorporated areas that surround us.

The recommendations of the report that the Board of Supervisors authorize the DHS director to execute a five-year contract for emergency ground ambulance service to the Sonoma in the Sonoma County Exclusive Operating Area One to the Sonoma County Fire District with the option to extend another five years.

The Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 in support of this recommendation.

Some background the Santa Rosa Fire Department has held a first response to life advanced life support contract, or what we'll refer to as FROWS contract with the previous grand ambulance contractor since 2004.

And we are an integral part of the robust EMS system in EOA 1.

Um, and as part of the new ground ambulance contract, it was important enough that the county actually inserted that this the Santa Rosa Froals program would continue under the new contractor.

So again, a lot of this we uh discussed at the January 9th meeting.

Um, but uh the FROLS partnership between Sonoma County Fire District and Santa Rosa was negotiated in good faith between us uh with the city attorney's office and the district.

The agreement actually took effect on January 16th, um, which is tied to the start of the new ground ambulance contract.

The expiration of the agreement aligned with the ground ambulance contract, the initial term ends in January on January 15th, 2029, with the ability to extend with a five-year extension of the ground ambulance contract to 2034.

And again, you've heard this in two study sessions and in the January 9th meeting, but our whole focus on this with these was these four points, and I really think that we fortified this uh through this new agreement.

Um our focus was on service to the community, number one, first and foremost, um, with the ability to enhance our operations and improve our operational control to fortify open communications and data sharing and build a financially sustainable model and agreement.

So, two slides here on some of the the key components of the partnership agreement.

Um, and certainly uh Chief Thomas and I will be available for questions, and Chief Thomas as the really the author of this can answer any uh more granular details that you may need.

But um the service area definition was a was a big one for us.

Um we have a clearly defined service area for the city's primary delivery of service, allowing city resources to be utilized and concentrated within the city limits.

Um the response response time framework.

Um we were using our city response times set forth by council under the ground ambulance contract.

There was some discussion about changing those, but we held strong that we wanted to use the council goals for our response times.

Um in this agreement, there's reciprocial obligations for the city and the fire district.

Obligations of both parties are more consistent and cooperative.

Um substantial change reopeners.

We inserted the opportunity to reopen this agreement and have discussions as required based on substantial changes to the system, whether that's operationally, financially, whatever the case may be.

And then with this uh really building the partnership of a joint development in support of EMS enhancements, gives us the opportunity to partner on system-wide enhancements and provide increased service to the community.

And then really with data sharing, we just codified data sharing between parties as both being public entities.

That's pretty much cleared up as it is, but really we wanted to build this regardless of who the contractor was to make sure that we had access to data at all times.

And really, sort of the heart of the matter here, um, and probably the most uh interesting to the subcommittee is uh are these five or six components here.

Number one is the compensation to the city of Santa Rosa.

Um our previous contract last year um was about six hundred and five thousand dollars for first response ALS service.

Under our new contract, we'll receive 1.5 million dollars per year for frail service.

Um this equates to complete cost recovery at the current time for our FROL service for our EMS division in its entirety.

Um there will be an annual adjustment based on the ground ambulance contract rate adjustment.

So as the rates goes up, our rates will go up as well.

Um with this, we also have our own medical director for the first time in the 20 years that we provide been providing advanced life support service.

And really the benefit to that is we have a medical director who is now dedicated to Santa Rosa and Chief Thomas and Captain Mathies have done a great job of selecting a doctor who will be our medical director to provide oversight training and consultation on a PSA or an agreement basis with the city.

So it's the first time we've had that, and really it's just dedicated to our personnel and to us.

Previously we've shared that.

Concurrently, we'll have our own CQI or continuous uh quality improvement program.

This will be the first time where we're not partnering in this, and we actually have our own CQI coordinator that will assist in employee development, quality assurance, and all the things we need to make our our system as strong as it can be.

But again, it's not going to be a shared resource, it will be just dedicated to our employees.

One of the components we're still working on, it's in the agreement, but we still have to develop it as a mutual aid agreement for surge ambulance protection.

Essentially, what this means is if the system, for whatever reason, due to a large-scale incident or due to a massive emergency, or just if the system gets busy, we as the city and the fire department want to have the ability to surge into the system with our own ambulances.

So it's something that we're working on.

It will be a side mutual aid agreement, but it's there is a provision within this contract that allows us to build that and do that, and we're going to be working on that really hard here in the next couple months.

And lastly, one of the elements that we really really wanted to look at was the ability to have long-term or planned revenue coming out of this in addition to the compensation for the ground ambulance or for the forals agreement itself.

And this will be through payment of a development of an ES EMS subscription fee or a first responder fee program.

We've looked at this in the past, and it could be lucrative and it could add additional revenue stream to pay for our EMS services.