The Vandalia City Council held a study session on Monday, June 15, 2026, beginning at 5:30 p.m., to review items slated for the evening's council meeting and the July 20, 2026 council meeting. The session included a Division of Fire update, proposed sewer and water contract awards, zoning variances and a conditional use, a small-box retail moratorium discussion, public works facility bids, charter review committee appointments, and May 2026 financial reports. The agenda also listed an executive session to consider real-property purchase or sale and public-employee compensation; the supplied transcript does not include that closed session.
All right, it's 5 30. We're gonna go ahead and get started with uh this evening's study session. Uh the first item on the agenda is a update from the division of fire. So I'd like to welcome uh Chief Follett. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity this evening to give you an update on the division of fire. Uh the focus in the division of fire still remains on Vandelion on Vandelia and Vandellians. It is delivering the uh top tier suburb and embodying the small city big opportunities, Matra. Uh we're doing that through the implementation of a strategic plan that includes a community risk action plan in our VFD way for approximately three years now. That the focus for that slide, please. Uh the focus of that has been on one more time. Thank you. Uh the focus has been on getting the in the staff to uh believe. Some people say buy in. We want more belief in that. So we are constantly using the messaging that we have in all the different ways. We become a very a more analytically driven organization. Uh the goals are very clearly posted in all the buildings. Uh we go over our messaging at every opportunity. We could we come together as a group through whether it be career uh staff meetings, command staff meetings, uh labor management meetings, training, uh any of those things, and we've implemented a new a new process, which I'll cover toward the end. Uh Comstat, which is a quarterly evaluation of the goals and of where we're at with our action planning and where we're at statistically with our data analysis. Slide, please. So if as you remember, our community risk assessment uh really identified three three driving forces. The first one is that time matters for us. So making sure that we are uh delivering uh service in a rapid manner, both through call handling times in our communication center, through turnout times in our fire stations, and through response times throughout the city, uh we are trying to stick to that goal of six and a half minutes uh response time goals and turnout time goals. Understand how being out of pocket impacts service delivery. In our community risk assessment, we showed you that there are hot areas in the city where we have had uh where we have some challenges with regards to the age of structures. Um we also have some challenges with travel distances from fire station to fire station. Uh so when we talk about out of pockets, specifically we're talking about station two. Uh station two crews are uh critical to the hot what we call the hot area of the city, which is the area where we had most of our fire experience. You're gonna see a slide here in a minute with a map on it that shows you the hot area, and I'll I'll refer to that. Um, but uh that has homes that are uh smaller homes, 700, 800 square foot homes that are 50 to 80 years old, depending on what neighborhood they're in. Uh, in that situation, a fire in those areas, uh getting getting quick notification on that and getting the first due engine there uh does a lot of is is seriously impactive to the safety and survival of people that may be trapped in those organizations in that building and or to the properties around them to keep that property lost down. So out-of-pocket times has become a big uh big discussion point in the fire department. Uh time inefficiencies, these are things that take away from our ability to to be able to deliver service in a rapid fashion. So long turnout times, um having crews committed to events. If you uh just recently at our our um flight fest, we brought or we brought overtime in to cover uh those and kept uh service available in the city like we normally would on any other day of the week's 365 days a year. We didn't want those medics to be pulled into that and not be able to deliver service and have to bring mutual aid and have longer wait times for the citizens. So we're doing things like reducing those time inefficiencies. Uh how we staff and deploy uh matters in time. You think see things like the squad. We're gonna talk about the squad in a second. Uh our ability to get three medics out pretty consistently, and the and again those uh reducing those out-of-pocket times. Next slide, please. Next thing we have in our in our goals are our efficiency and effectiveness. This is really our preparation, our training piece of this. Uh, we want that top-tier value added service with that becomes top-tier value added training. Um, so we want to make sure that we're delivering that type of training. This has been a mindset change for our guys. Uh, we've completely retooled our training program over the last three years.