“We’re in a staffing crisis right now;” Ottawa Fire department addresses problems before City Council

Fire Chief Brian Bressner and Deputy Fire Chief Mike Mills didn’t hold back in their meeting with the Ottawa City Council on Friday morning as the department is hurting bad when it comes to staffing.

Bressner stated the department is operating with seven members down with the possibility of losing two more. Of the 27 firefighters available at full staff, it currently has 20.

This is shortage has been put a strain on the department with calls being at an all-time high and a staff that is seeing more injuries than the state and federal averages.

“We’re asking these guys that are running with 18 or 20 personnel to keep running for 4,000 calls, keep running to 12 to 15 calls a day,” Bressner said. “Every day is an overtime day, calling them currently once this morning and we called twice yesterday.”

Bressner said the firefighters don’t have much of a home life at this point and when they are home, their phones are ringing.

The department’s issues stem from the recruitment of new firefighters and retaining them. Ottawa’s starting salary for a firefighter is in line with departments like Oswego, Naperville and Aurora, but it tops out at $75,218 per year while Oswego tops out at $94,816.

Bressner said the department only comes close to that number when factoring in the large amount of overtime firefighters are putting in because they’re short-staffed.

“The city needs to be proud of what they’re doing because they’re doing more with less right now,” Bressner said. “I know there’s days when they come in and they’re cranky and tired and I feel their pain.”

Mills said being so low on firefighters has limited the department’s ability to keep up on training and run special assignments like what he referred to as ‘pre-plans,’ which are inspections firefighters do to make sure there aren’t any hazards to firefighters or civilians.

“It handcuffs us for basically all of our operations, because right now we’re in survival mode,” Mills said. “We’re basically just trying to cover our emergency calls.”

Bressner’s presentation laid out a plan that would help the department build up a farm system of sorts that would allow it to train 18-year-olds interested in the fire service.

The plan would be to hire at 18 and train them over a three year process so when they turn 21, they can be hired already meeting all the training requirements set forth by the contract, although this is a solution that would take three years.

Mayor Dan Aussem said the city has also worked with a lobbyist along with other cities to see if there’s a way to change the age required to be a firefighter to 18 instead of 21, although he said there’s been some pushback and it may have to wait until after the election.

The department is also in need of new facilities, with station one at 301 Lafayette St. being in fair condition and the south side station at 1301 State St. being in poor condition.

Bressner said the department has outgrown both and is in need of a third station in the future and neither currently have room for expansion.

Commissioner Tom Ganiere, a retired firefighter, said the year he started the department ran 854 calls split about 50/50 between fire and medical calls, and over 90% of those were to the high rises for things like burnt food. Bressner’s numbers show that the department this year has run 4,154 calls.

“In 51 years, the fire department has only increased in size twice,” Ganiere said. “In 1971 when they built the Southside station I think they hired six or eight and then in 1995 they hired three more firefighters. That’s it. As we all know, if you’ve got a business and you increase your business five fold, you will increase your staffing or your business goes under.”

Many of the department’s needs, Bressner said, are universal among a lot of fire departments, and some of these can be addressed through grants.

During the upcoming City Council meeting at 7 p.m. on Tuesday at 301 W. Madison St., the city will vote on submitting two grant applications; one to help purchase new self-contained breathing apparatuses to replace the old ones and another called the SAFER grant, a federal grant that pays the first three years of salary for new firefighters in an effort to aid departments struggling to hire.