FLINT, Mich. — A new report is recommending that fire, police and EMS overhaul their organizational structure to incidents that are reported and responded to.
The report, commissioned by former Emergency Manager Darnell Early, presented 16 major changes to city council members.
A major change included that officers stop responding to incidents such as accidents, medical incidents and alarms, MLive.com reported. It also recommended that the city cut its arson and cold case investigations and reassign those resources to investigating violent crime.
The creators of the report called for the city fire department and state fire marshal to help cover arson investigations.
“There are different ways you can handle the arson piece,” said Joseph Pozzo, who worked on the evaluation of the city’s fire services.
Despite the arson fires, Pozzo said it may not be in the city’s best interest to invest in arson investigation.
“You typically don’t catch people who set vacant buildings on fire because they are long gone before anybody sees it,” Pozzo said.
Sixty percent of the calls the fire department responds to are for fire services. Nearly 30 percent of the calls are for emergency medical services.
The report also claims the EMS transportation system is “highly inefficient” and has no city oversight. Pozzo said the EMS service should have local government oversight even if it is handled privately.
Flint’s fire department ranks in the 90th percentile in dispatch times, with the times being 3-4 minutes longer than national averages. Turnout times are also two minutes greater than national benchmarks, according to the report.
It takes fire crews roughly 13 minutes to respond to fire and EMS calls, the report says.
Recommended changes include overhauling the organizational structure of the fire department and better targeting resources to times of higher demand.
“Both the police and fire departments are evaluating these recommendations and will use these as guidelines for the development of upcoming revisions to the city’s strategic plan,” Flint Emergency Manager Gerald Ambrose Ambrose said. “We still have severe limitations on the available revenue for public safety services.”