10-06-2021, 03:00 PM
(10-06-2021, 02:36 PM)Coke6pk Wrote:(10-06-2021, 02:21 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Now, is there any particular reason why fire services have to be a city responsibility rather than regional, the way police and EMS are (not to mention transit, libraries and public health)?
The question is why have we not changed them. Local Police were all municipal until 1973. Local transit was municipal until 2000. These were not forced by legislation. There have been talks of going regional with fire (It makes so much sense, but I am assuming the huge city budgets allotted to them are part of the reason why change is scary)
Coke
I think moving Fire to the Regional level makes a lot of sense. Then all the emergency services would be handled at the same level.
Additionally, as someone else pointed out, I don’t think the capacity problem for Fire is actual fires; they do a lot of medical calls. But how can it make sense to send a fire truck for a medical call rather than an ambulance? It’s a bigger vehicle with more people. Of course it makes sense for Fire to be able to step in when EMS happens to be busy, but in terms of capacity planning, Fire should be planned only for fire, while EMS should be planned to cover medical calls. This is easier if both are managed by the same government, in this case the Regional government.
Probably we would merge the existing fire services to a new Regional service with no expansion, or maybe even a small decrease, and target increases to EMS. But of course the Region would study the question carefully before making an actual decision.