Reviewing statistics is a part of what the Warsaw-Wayne Township Fire Protection Territory Board does during its regularly scheduled monthly meetings.
Instead of providing statistics for the board this month electronically, however, Fire Chief Brian Mayo had to relay them verbally as the department is working on figuring out how to pull the data they want from the new records management software.
“So you will notice there is no report inside your packet this month. We discussed a couple months ago when we were in transition between data reporting systems that we have, and we have transitioned wholeheartedly to the First Due program that we were going to bolster up to. Some of those reports are unique for us to pull out or extrapolate data, so we’re trying to conform those, make them a little bit more user-friendly,” Mayo said.
The total calls for November were 269, with 82 being fire calls and EMS 125. With the First Due system only being live for two months, Mayo said the CARES (Community Assistance, Resources, Emergency Services) calls might be a little different than what CARES Director Chris Fancil has, but Mayo said they had 62 going back to October.
Mayo told the board that if there was something they wanted to see in those monthly reports to let him know.
“To me, I think there was a lot of data in there, so if you want to keep everything that was in there in the past, we can definitely do that. If you want to trim it down a little bit and just give you exact numbers on fire, EMS, CARES - we put public occurrences in there, as well, how many times we go to the school, kids we see, that type of stuff,” Mayo said. “If there’s something extra you want to see, by all means we can provide that as well, but this is just one of those opportunities where we’re in between going from one system to another.”
With Jeff Grose coming on board as the city’s new mayor in January, Mayo said Grose might want to see something different as well, but he didn’t know.
Councilman Mike Klondaris asked Mayo if he thought that by the next board meeting the new format of the report would be ready to view. “I sure hope so,” Mayo replied. “I believe so.”
Klondaris said he did not want to change the information in those monthly reports, or at least not until the board can see what the new format will look like to make a better decision.
Fancil then presented an update on CARES with November’s statistics.
“We’re still dealing with a lot of mental health care needs in our community. You’ll see we had 74 total interactions with folks in November,” he said, with mental health care being the most needs reported to CARES by community members.
He said, from his perspective, the need for transportation seemed a little low. “Each month we deal with a need for transportation, whether that’s doctor’s offices, to mental health to appointments to whatever that may be,” he said.
Housing is always an issue, though Fancil noted the “whole community” was working on that. “And then just general support, shelter, in-home services,” he said.
They had eight 911 follow-ups in November. “We did a lot of recurrent follow-ups. What that means is people who we are kind of constantly meeting with to keep them out of that crisis state. I can’t state how important that is. If we don’t do those follow-ups, those people end up in a mental health crisis, and then either end up in the legal system or in an in-patient facility somewhere. We’re trying to make that so it doesn’t happen. That’s the goal of this - is to try to keep them at home, able to take care of themselves, able to follow up with good resources,” Fancil explained.
Klondaris said he would find it helpful if the board could see a monthly report to compare CARES’ statistics from month to month. Fancil said they could provide a month-to-month comparison.
“We are already - with the change to First Due - we changed some of the data that we’re collecting with CARES Calls. Some of that is because the grants we’re utilizing requires us to have some different numbers - age brackets, ethnicity, if they’re homeless, if they’re not homeless - just different things. If there’s substance abuse involved. We’re already collecting all of that data. So we could definitely pull some of that so that you could see those numbers, and then we could do a side-by-side on months so that you could see what that looks like as well,” Fancil said.
Board member Gordon Nash agreed it would be nice to be able to have the figures month by month so they can see what’s trending.
Fancil then reminded the board that starting in January, “We will have access to that grant we received mid-year. We’re just working the bugs out so that everybody’s happy with the accounting and the accountability of that grant. We want to make sure we’re crossing all the T’s and dotting all the i’s. So, we’ll hopefully be able to kind of have some more money to spend on some things that we need starting in January.”
Board member David Allbritten asked Fancil for more information on that grant since he hasn’t been on the board long.
Fancil explained, “We applied for and received some opioid matching funds.” He said it was approximately $377,000 and that money will be used for CARES Coordinator Mikaela Bixler’s salary in 2024 and 2025, a new vehicle and just some operating expenses that have been incurred and will continously be incurred as the program moves forward.
In other business, the WWFT board will look almost the same in 2024 as it has in 2023. The only exception will be that instead of Mayor Joe Thallemer being one of the five board members, it will be Mayor Jeff Grose.
The board heard that the township’s appointments for 2024 will continue to be trustee Jeanie Stackhouse and Gordon Nash, while the city’s appointments are Klondaris and the mayor. All four board members present at Tuesday’s meeting voted unanimously for Allbritten to continue to serve as the at-large fifth member.
The board also reappointed Mayo as the fire chief for 2024.