Does hours cap risk lives?

WASILLA — Amidst the many questions Mat-Su Borough emergency responders had for management Saturday during a meeting at the fire station in downtown Wasilla, the conversation circled back multiple times to the same one: Are staffing levels resulting from a newly imposed 29.9-hour cap for on-call responders’ hours a crisis?

Responders had their own view.

“The general public does not understand that we’re in a crisis situation,” said EMT II Sandy Hoeft. “We’ve got to get this fixed.”

The cap came about at the start of the year following an audit, which caused the state to insist that any responder working more than 30 hours — even paid on-call, rather than full- or part-time, employees — be offered retirement benefits.

Saying it can’t afford that, the borough responded by capping the number of hours a responder can work in a week. Responders said that has led to holes in scheduling and diminished response times. Cross-trained responders — firefighters who are also medics or rescue techs or some combination of the three — have had to choose which discipline to focus on.

While responders are calling the situation a crisis, Mat-Su Borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan said it is important not to overstate conditions when making the case to borough assembly members, who will ultimately decide how to address the situation. He said describing the issue as a “crisis” is hyperbole.

“‘Crisis’ is a strong word. I see that we have a strong challenge ahead of us,” Brodigan said.

He said the situation has been coming to a head for a decade. An audit in 2005 described emergency services as “in imminent danger of failure.” Even before that report, and continuing through today, Brodgian said he has painted the picture for the assembly each year at budget time.

“The system just isn’t stable, especially in emergency medical services,” he said.

He said for fiscal year 2015, which starts this summer, he’s asking the borough to hire 14 paramedics. The next year he’ll ask for seven positions — four paramedics and three EMTs — and the year after that seven more — three paramedics and four EMTs.

On the firefighting side, the Wasilla Lakes Fire Service Area Board of Supervisors on Jan. 13 unanimously approved four full-time firefighting positions, Brodigan said. In the meantime, he said he had talk to the assembly to see if there are funds available to add some of those positions prior to the start of the fiscal year.

Hoeft wondered if mid-summer would be soon enough. Brodigan said it probably will be more like September before there are boots on the ground.

Ashley Cunnington, a paramedic whose hours, like Hoeft’s, are capped at 30, said that by then the borough would likely have burned out a lot of its more experienced responders. Part of the way the borough has worked to make up the shortage of responders has been to give massive amounts of overtime pay to its few full-time employees.

That means new hires may not have many experienced folks to rely on for training and mentorship.

“Most of these people are fresh out of school, and we were all there once, but they won’t have the more senior people to show them the ropes,” she said.

Brodigan said he had been assured the borough has the resources to make it through to the start of FY 2015. He said some of the details he heard Saturday led him to believe that might not be the case and conversations about those details would be his top priority on Monday.

Laura Bleicher, a firefighter, nursing student and former medic who left the service to attend nursing school, said she’s worried what’s going to happen with the borough’s stable of emergency responders.

“People are going to get frustrated and they’re going to quit,” she said, adding that diminished responding capacity is going to mean longer response times. “Someone’s going to die. This is not acceptable for the system to collapse to that point.”

Linda Combs, a Palmer city councilwoman who attended the meeting, urged borough officials and responders to talk to their elected representatives. She said if they feel like they’ve been neglected, it was probably only out of ignorance on the politicians’ part.

“It’s usually not because someone doesn’t care,” she said. “It’s because, frankly, you’re under an avalanche of information.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.