Fitch study: Cottage Grove central station covers >90% of calls; consultants recommend data fixes, staffing and staged capital options

Consultants from Fitch & Associates presented a draft standards-of-cover and community risk assessment to the Cottage Grove Public Service Commission and described options to improve reliability without immediately adding stations.

BJ (senior consultant) and Michael Mondor outlined the firm’s methodology: four phases (qualitative stakeholder input, GIS/station-location analysis, community risk assessment and standards-of-cover recommendations). They emphasized reporting 90th‑percentile response times as a measure of reliability and said Cottage Grove’s 90th‑percentile performance measured roughly dispatch 4.3 minutes, turnout 3.1 minutes and travel 9.3 minutes for a total near 14.3 minutes.

The GIS work showed the city’s central fire station can reach approximately 93.5% of Cottage Grove calls within the modeled travel-time standard; when EMS partner communities (Newport, Saint Paul Park and Grey Cloud Island) are included, similar coverage holds for EMS calls at roughly nine minutes. Consultants flagged Station 4 as overlapping the central station and noted the marginal return on investment if it were staffed as a duplicate response station; they estimated that upgrading Station 4 to a fully usable staffed response station would require substantial investment (consultant cited about $1,000,000).

Fitch recommended focusing on improvements with the best return on investment — better dispatch-processing and turnout-time data and processes — before committing to additional physical facilities. They presented fleet-replacement guidance (ambulances ~7-year ideal replacement plus reserve, light-duty 10 years, heavy apparatus 15 years) and warned of procurement lead times that can reach multiple years for some apparatus.

On EMS finance, consultants presented four options to address uncompensated care and cost shortfalls: apportion uncompensated care by net bill/collections, allocate cost by actual resource usage or call share, distribute budget deficits by call volume, or consider creating an EMS taxing district under 'statute 144 F' with an elected board to levy funds. Consultants emphasized collaboration with partner jurisdictions rather than unilateral action.

Commissioners asked about staffing models, ambulance counts and the practical ability to host overnight ambulances in partner communities; consultants said the city currently staffs what equates to 1.5 ambulances daily (one staffed unit with cross-staffing of a second apparatus), and that modest growth would likely require a dedicated second ambulance within about four years unless staffing or governance changes. The consultants said they will deliver a final draft to the council on December 3 and that council-level political and budget decisions will follow.

The presentation closed with staff and commissioners agreeing to use the report as a factual basis for subsequent service-level, budget and governance decisions: no formal council action was taken at the commission meeting.