The Otsego Fire Department is getting a chance to test out having a full-time fire fighter in the office thanks to an arrangement with the city’s police.
Fire chief Brandon Weber said the department had an officer manning the fire station from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, one of the ideas he had proposed for dealing with the department’s large volume of calls.
“We want to use it as a proof of concept,” Weber said
The officer is technically an Otsego Police Department officer, though he’s wearing a slightly different uniform.
Weber said police chief Gordon Konkle had come up with the idea and brought it to him.
“Gordon came to me and pointed out we don’t have a city manager right now, so we can use the money to put a part-time police officer in the fire station who is a firefighter and EMS in Cooper,” he said.
Weber has been speaking to both the City of Otsego and Otsego Township—the two municipalities covered by and paying for the department—about the need for something to change due to the high volume of calls being handled. Weber has told both governments that over 800 calls in a year would be answered by fire fighters—driven by a large and growing number of medical calls—and that meant the department must change its approach.
“We are going gangbusters, as we have for most of this year,” he said. “We’re at a T-intersection, we know we have to turn left or turn right.”
In October, Weber presented a list of three options to the city commission for dealing with the increased call volume by bringing one to three full-time positions to the currently all paid on-call department.
The current arrangement is testing that.
“He’s taking the medicals, alarms and things like that off the board,” Weber said.
The hope is that with a full-time person or persons on board, the calls handled by the volunteers who make up most of the department will be less of a drain on morale. And the medical calls can be responded to quicker by an on-call person.
“We’ll be able to see what we can eliminate and how far we can get the response time down,” Weber said.
The temporary full-time person is also being used to complete maintenance and other tasks around the fire station that need doing in between handling calls.
“He’s inventorying all the gear we have there and checking it for condition,” Weber said. “He’s also going to restripe the truck bay.
“Jobs like that, which I don’t know when they’d get done otherwise.”
Contact Dan Pepper at dpepper@allegannews.com or at (269) 673-5534.
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