Meeting on fire district study closed to all but committee
Firefighters still haven't seen draft services study
Egan upset with report
By Kara Chalmers
A wildfire of controversy, which began in April over a study of fire and medical services in the Saratoga Fire District, is spreading.
SFD Commission chairman Robert Egan, upset with the study's progress, asked on May 25 that the public and the press leave the meeting during a discussion of the study. Only a week earlier, commissioners told the Saratoga News the meeting would be public.
Only members of the committee formed to oversee the study stayed for the remainder of the meeting.
DMG Maximus, a consulting firm hired by the SFD, had released its first draft of the study to the district on April 4. The report was highly anticipated by SFD union firefighters, who want the SFD to merge with the Santa Clara County Fire Department.
When commissioners did not distribute copies of the report to firefighters, but only to members of the committee, the firefighters said they felt out of the loop. Capt. Bill Morrison, president of the firefighters' union, is the only firefighter on the committee.
Later, when the SFD administration said it was not planning to distribute the report to the firefighters until it was revised, the firefighters became anxious.
Firefighters had hoped their fears would be allayed on May 25, when the commissioners said they would hold a public meeting with a representative of DMG to make any necessary changes or additions to the report.
But at the meeting, attended by firefighters from both the SFD and the Santa Clara County Fire Department and the Saratoga News, Egan asked that everyone except committee members leave.
The committee consists of the three SFD commissioners, SFD Chief Ernie Kraule, Santa Clara County Fire Department Chief Douglas Sporleder, consultant for the district Lane Long, Morrison, and former Saratoga Public Safety Commission chairman Frank Lemmon.
The report, for which the district is paying, includes facts about the district that DMG will base its future recommendations on. DMG says committee members need to check the data for accuracy before the draft is released.
The firefighters say that since they contributed to this data, they should be allowed to check it, too. The consultants collected the data by interviewing both administration and SFD firefighters. DMG also interviewed Chief Sporleder.
Kraule and Egan made it clear on May 25, that they do not want the unchecked report released to the public. Kraule said that the study is just beginning, and if all meetings about it are open to the public and the press, the public will be misinformed.
But Art Marshall, union president for the county fire department, said citizens of Saratoga have a right to participate in the process because they are paying for it.
"Public funds have been approved for this study to be done," he said. "Does that mean only parts of it, the end result? Is watching the project come to fruition something the public is not entitled to?"
Kraule said he believes the final report is what the public is most interested in, and that he would rather keep the study closed and issue only the final report to citizens.
"The more misinformation gets out to the public, the more confused the public becomes," Kraule said. "Information is not always accurate."
Lane Long, a consultant for the SFD, said that when a consultant has been hired to study an organization, public meetings are not held every step of the way.
Somewhere along the line, the process "got off whack," Long said. Nothing was ever supposed to be made public, including the draft report or the meeting scheduled to discuss it.
Sporleder said the study's committee agreed from the outset that the process would not be secret. He also said that he was told not to distribute the draft to the county firefighters and that so far, he has complied with the SFD's wishes. But he said that was not the process he had followed in the past when his department was studied.
Egan said he wants the proceedings kept private because he finds fault with the study. He agreed with Sporleder that the committee initially had agreed to keep things open, but the consultants have not done what they were supposed to do.
"I'm really upset with the report," Egan said. "If this had studied the Saratoga Fire District as we requested, I probably wouldn't be concerned."
Commissioners will not comment on what specific mistakes they found in the preliminary report, but Egan said the report should not contain statistics on the county department and its response times.
One section of the report, which compares the cost structures of both departments, finds them to be similar, but concludes that the much larger county fire district spends less of its budget on overhead. The report also shows that the county fire district supports additional functions that the SFD does not provide, such as a training facility. The SFD spends more of its budget on salaries, wages and benefits, according to the report.
Commissioners will not specify which figures contained in the draft report are mistaken.
On May 18, after an earlier SFD Commissioners meeting, Commissioner Jay Geddes, in the company of commissioners Henry Clark and Egan, told the Saratoga News that if the firefighters were interested, they could view the report anytime. During the May 25 meeting, which Geddes and Clark skipped, paramedic firefighter Beau Rahn asked to see the report. Egan said that the decision was up to Morrison, but suggested that Morrison not show the report.
According to Morrison, this was the first time he was told he had clearance to show the report to the firefighters. He said he still does not plan to, since on or around June 8, the committee decided that DMG would come back with a revised document. He said SFD firefighters could view that document.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
