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Morrisville fire chief details data fixes and requests three budgeted firefighter positions to raise minimum staffing
Summary
Fire Chief Tom Doolin told the Town Council that data‑quality issues had distorted turnout and travel‑time metrics, that technology and deployment changes are improving accuracy, and he asked the council to approve three budgeted firefighter positions (one per shift) to reach a 20‑person per‑shift staffing goal and enable four‑person engine companies.
Fire Chief Tom Doolin told the Town Council that a review of the department’s GAAP gap report identified data‑quality problems that had distorted turnout and travel‑time metrics and that technical fixes and staffing changes are already underway.
“Not all data is bad,” Doolin said. “We can learn a lot from it when we dive into it,” and described switching from legacy tablets tied to trucks to iPads with cellular service and installing cellular boosters at stations to remove delays that made en‑route times look longer than they were.
Why it matters: the town uses turnout and travel times to measure emergency response performance and to plan apparatus and staffing. Doolin said the department still operates with a three‑person minimum on many frontline trucks, but that the department’s “ideal number is 20” personnel per shift — a level that would allow crews of four per company while preserving coverage for vacations, sick leave and other absences.
“We would be shooting for that 80 seconds or that minute 20, and we’d be shooting for that 5 minutes,” he said when describing target turnout and travel times. He told the council the department is asking the council to include “one position per shift” in next year’s budget — three firefighters in total — so the department can institutionalize a 20‑per‑shift minimum.
Council members asked for clarifications about how shifts are scheduled, current vacancies and how the department’s mutual‑aid partnership (CAM) factors into response planning. Doolin said Morrisville runs three 24‑hour shifts (A, B and C) and confirmed there are four current vacancies the department is actively recruiting to fill. He said CAM’s close coordination with neighboring departments helps meet critical‑task staffing on larger incidents even when single units are staffed with three personnel.
Doolin also outlined non‑staffing steps to improve measured response times, including: auditing call‑report narratives, moving to a different records/response app (Freedom app), getting back‑end CAD access to raw timestamps, and adjusting deployment models away from the “Quint” approach toward distinct engine and ladder roles so crews know assignments on arrival.
Cost and near‑term asks: the chief gave council a cost estimate for traffic‑signal preemption infrastructure and device service — about $116,000 for a five‑year truck‑side service contract plus roughly $20,000–$25,000 per intersection to equip lights (with engineering/programming costs of about $6,000–$8,000 per signal). He asked the council to approve the three firefighter positions in the upcoming budget cycle; council members signaled support for prioritizing staffing and asked staff to present budget language and timing.
Next step: the chief said staff will bring concrete budget language and the related personnel request to the town's budget process for council consideration; the council did not take a formal vote at this meeting.
Attributions: Chief Tom Doolin made the presentation and asked for the budgeted positions. Multiple council members questioned and discussed the technical and staffing tradeoffs, including queries about mutual aid, device connectivity and the cost of traffic preemption.
