The Budget Committee of the Saint Paul City Council met on September 16, 2026, to review the Saint Paul Fire Department's proposed 2027 budget. Assistant Chief Jeremiah Malquis presented the department's goals, staffing changes, revenue initiatives, and operational challenges. Council members expressed strong support for the CARES team, concern over proposed cuts and overtime budget, and called for a strategic plan to address staffing and safety.
Roll call, please. Vice Chair Young. Councilmember Bowie. Here. Councilmember Coleman? Councilmember Kim? Councilmember Jost? Council President Maker? Here. Chair Johnson? Here. Seven present. Zero absent. Thank you, Kara. So we are just continuing the wonderful series when it comes to the twenty twenty-seven budget. We have in front of us the Saint Paul Fire Department who will present today. Welcome to Malquest. Yes, thank you. Uh good morning, City Council uh Budget Chair Johnson, uh, City Council President Acre and distinguished council members. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and present. Uh I want to take a moment to thank the women and men of the St. Paul Fire Department who are here with us today. I appreciate it. And also recognize the local twenty-one leadership that is here. Thank you. My name is Jeremiah Malquis. I'm assistant chief of operations. I tend to talk a little fast, so I try to slow down today, and in the fire profession, we lose uh use a lot of acronyms. So if there's anything that uh you don't uh know what the acronym stands for, uh please by all means raise your hand and uh's gonna explain. The first slide here's the agenda. It's pretty self-explanatory, so we'll go to the second slide and jump into it. Uh but the executive summary, uh, our department goals and priorities in twenty twenty-seven are to maintain NFPA response times to meet and mitigate emergencies that are residents experience. We need to effectively meet the projected three to five percent increase in calls for service in twenty twenty-seven while maintaining operational effectiveness and service quality. We also need to preserve frontline staffing and unit availability. We are dedicated to creating a new strategic plan that will address EMS capacity and use data to make deployment changes to meet the demand and incident volume increases. We will also continue to lobby for increased staffing to meet the needs of the community while simultaneously taking care of our firefighters and minimizing overtime. I think it's important to recognize that this is a balanced package that includes some reductions, some deployment changes, some revenue growth, and some needed operational additions. Like most of the city departments, most of our budget, 87% to be exact, is assigned to the employee salaries and benefits. Our net staffing change is two fewer FTEs. Five positions have been removed. And one PSG FTE has is going to be unfilled. We also added three EMS chiefs for a net of minus two. This plan avoids layoffs, but the attrition creates operational risk that needs to be monitored throughout the entire 2027 fiscal year. The summary of God will jump on the next slide. Next slide, please. Our 2026 budget recap. We're gonna jump into CARES. CARES is our community alternative response for emergency services team. It's presently dedicated, it's a it is a presently dedicated rig of two trained EMTs that specialize in behavioral health emergencies. Year to date, cares has responded to 918 calls.