RichardSpackmann.com

Fall 2010 Newsletter

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:08:19 -0400

Here is a sneak peak at the Fall 2010 Greenfield Fire District newsletter.

Thanks to all who helped, it is quite lengthy and full of great information about all the great stuff our volunteers do for our community!

The newsletter is tentatively scheduled to be mailed in the middle of September - I'll try and post back with updates.

Download the newsletter here.

Any questions, just let me know.

Porter Corners "Clerk of the Works" Advertisement

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 14:43:56 -0400

I volunteered to write up an advertisement to solicit resumes for position of "Clerk of the Works" for the exterior renovations at the Porter Corners firehouse.

This advertisement is tentatively scheduled to be placed in the paper next Thursday.

Any questions, let me know!

The Greenfield Fire District is soliciting resume's for the position of "Clerk of the Works" for a multi-month construction project at the Porter Corners firehouse located at 405 Bockes Road, Porter Corners, NY 12859.

The Clerk of the Works is expected to present verbal and written reports of the construction progress at regularly scheduled night public meetings of the Board of Fire Commissioners. The Clerk of the Works' primary responsibility will be to oversee the construction project and ensure that the Greenfield Fire District's best interests are fulfilled as well ensuring that the construction project is on schedule and adhering to plans approved by the Greenfield Fire District Board of Fire Commissioners. Additional responsibilities may be added by the Board of Fire Commissioners at their discretion.

We encourage all applicants to attend meetings of the Board of Fire Commissioners to better inform themselves of the fire district as well as to acquaint themselves to the construction project throughout the drafting phase.

Resumes and cover letters can be mailed no later than August 1st at the following address:

Greenfield Fire District Board of Fire Commissioners P.O. Box 103 Greenfield Center, NY 12833

Resumes may also be hand delivered to the district office.

Construction is expected to begin late summer/early fall and continue through to the end of fall/winter.

The scope of the work is currently being drafted where specific work requirements will be determined.

Wages and salaries will be dependent upon experience, qualifications and the scope of work.

Letters of recommendations may be requested during the application process.

The Greenfield Fire District is an equal opportunity employer.

R.I.P. Soldier David Taylor Miller

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:04:48 -0400

News just came out of the loss of another of our country's heroes David Taylor Miller - a 2009 graduate of Saratoga Springs High School. He was lost protecting our freedom in Afghanistan.

See the Post Star online article for more information.

My heartfelt condolences to his family, we will never forget his ultimate sacrifice in protecting us.

Fire Instructor I Training

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 10:03:42 -0500

I will be leaving for one week to go to the NYS Fire Academy in Montour Falls to take the Fire Instructor 1 course.

I will be gone for a week but will have access to voice mail and email - all urgent issues please see Commissioner Waite.

Any questions, please just let me know.

Acting Chairman Through April 2010

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:24:16 -0500

I will once again be serving as acting chairman of the board of commissioners while the current Chairman is away on vacation.

There was substantial support from the officers and other members of the Board to support me for the actual Chairman position, and while I am very honored by this, I can not in good conscious take the position with my current workload.

I know that there has already been some big discussions around cost-cutting measures. The Board has been discussing this for a few weeks now and at the January workshop, we will be discussing some options we have been researching for a few months now - and I hope that this movement continues forward through the rest of the year.

Any questions, please contact me.

District Year-End Monies

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 08:21:23 -0500

As is the norm with municipalities, when the fiscal year comes to an end, any unspent funds are usually directed to savings acounts or to other projects. The GFD has an annual "year-end close of the books" meeting to expend any remaining funds and to wrap up business for the year (this year's "year-end meeting" is on December 30th at the Greenfield Center firehouse).

As is always the case, there is a lot of discussion about what we should focus on for year end monies. Generally what usually happens is that Commissioners field requests from officers for funding for various projects that were either (1) denied throughout the year (due to a variety of reasons - which could be financial) or (2) are "outreach" projects which aren't necessarily given a priority funding - but are "nice to have".

For this year's focus I would prefer to address the following:

Apparatus Equipment Mounting: one of the things that came out of the apparatus consultant survey was that we need to do a much better job of mounting equipment in our trucks - whether it is in the cab or compartments. The labor required to redo the mounting is fairly large per truck, and the mounting parts aren't the cheapest either - considering their NFPA design requirements.

As this is a safety issue, this should be given priority funding - and I'm pleased to see many of our officers already working on this task, in preparation for the year-end meeting.
Hose Replacement: this was the first year the fire district (finally!) tested hose across the district and we found a vast amount of the district hose inventory failed the testing, and had to be removed from service.

Granted that not all this hose has to be replaced all at once, we can put it on a multi-year replacement schedule to help soften the expense - but we certainly need to replace the priority pieces - the one's that failed on our trucks for example. Naturally, I'll be looking to our officers to make that determination, and we'll try and accomodate that listing.
Fire Police Radios: with the county transition to higher-band radio frequencies, the GFD has already purchased some high-band radios, and we have discovered that they are actually much cheaper than their low-band counterparts. I have worked closely with the fire police over the past couple of years and I have discovered that they have been under-funded for many years.

Their radio inventory is quite old and antiquated, and unfortunately, has taken a second place to other funding priorities - and this simply must be stopped. Communication when you are standing in the middle of a road is essential to our firefighter's safety, and the radios that are currently utilized by our fire police are half-broken, unreliable and are in need of replacing.

I see no reason that we can't start replacing the fire police radio inventory this year.

Naturally this is not a complete listing and priority items identified by our firematic officers will of course get consideration.

In any case, I wanted to start the creative juices flowing, and to shed some light on what my preferences for year-end monies would be.

Any questions, please just let me know.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:30:34 -0500

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

I wish everyone the very best this Thanksgiving!

Training Laptop Anti-Virus Installation

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:04:12 -0500

At the November Commissioner's mtg we discussed the (*finally*!) delivered training laptops.

I will be installing anti-virus and configuring the laptops this weekend, in preparation to issue them to each fire company.

I'll post back here when that project is completed. In the meantime, any questions, just let me know.

2010 Budget Followup (Decrease in Taxes)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:36:47 -0500

I am very proud to see the 2010 budget with a decrease in tax rate.

You can view the approved 2010 budget online here:

http://www.greenfieldfd.org/documents/Approved%20Budget%202010.pdf

Unfortunately there were very little people who actually attended the public budget hearing - but those who did attend were a little concerned with the "perceived" 4% raise of the 2010 budget.

I use the word "perceived" here in quotes, as it was simply that - "perceived" 4% raise. The fact is, that while the budget grew in size 4%, the tax rate in the tentative budget was actually the same.

The Board later decided unanimously to cut a little more - which actually resulted in the tax rate going down for the 2010 budget.

Any questions, just let me know.

Campaign Signs Are Out!

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:28:00 -0500

I completed the last round of campaign signs last night throughout the fire district.

Special thanks to everyone who helped out! It's very much appreciated.

I've had numerous requests for signs - which I'm very happy about, but there are plenty left - so feel free to ask me for one!

Budget Hearing Follow-up

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:24:21 -0400

I wanted to share the questions (and more importantly the answers) that came out of our public budget hearing.

Before I do that however, I wanted to clarify a few things about the "tentative budget", and the budget process as a whole.

The tentative budget, as the name implies, is tentative. It's really just one step in a multi-month process which began back in July in drafting the 2010 budget.

I started putting ideas down on paper and researching their costs back in July, and as other Commissioners did the same, the Board began to have meetings and publically brainstorming the 2010 project. I believe, the Board had at least two or three meetings where the budget (or various aspects of it) were discussed publically well before the "tentative" budget was even put together.

What I'm trying to explain is just how lengthy the budget process actually is. The Board of Fire Commissioners takes the responsibility of creating the budget very seriously - and we stride to keep taxes low, and to maximize the return on our taxpayers monies.

And the Board of Fire Commissioners goes above and beyond what is required by law to be as open and transparent as possible as a local government. I was unable to find any tentative budgets on any neighboring fire district's websites (which is a requirement by law), nor do I know of any other fire districts that have newsletters (a compliment the Board received in fact during the public hearing).

So the GFD does a lot towards open government, and to inform our residents of the Board's thoughts regarding the budget.

As I've commented previously, there were some unfortunate false conclusions drawn about the tentative budget. For example, I heard that people believed that taxes were going up 4%. Granted the wording in the newsletter could have been better, but it was not misleading in my opinion. No where in the newsletter did it say "increase of taxes" - just that the overall budget size grew 4% - but the two are definitely not the same thing.

The fact is, that the proposed tax rate was less than 1 cent (yes that's 1 penny) more than last year - so for all intensive purposes, I commonly refer to that as a 0% raise. So how can the tax rate be 0% different from last year, and the budget grow by 4%? Its because we had a lot of new properties come onto the tax roles. Ultimately that means that we have more money coming "into the pot" so to speak.

I'm not able to speak for the rest of the Board, but I know that none of the Board members ever stated (or believed for that matter) that we should raise taxes 4%. Unfortunately, that at the press time of the newsletters, more information regarding the budget was not available - so the information regarding the budget was relatively brief (which is probably why it was a little confusing).

Now with that said, let's move on to some of the questions raised during the meeting (in no particular order):

Why do we have a line-item for vaccinations?
Why did you double the building reserve account?
Why do you have a line-item for hose testing and pump testing? that was only $2000 last year, and now its $13,500
I'm not happy about the maintenance person
$16,000 for phones seems like a lot, can you get a handle on that?
I think the EMS account should be increased, that is the majority of your calls - why is it only $9,000?
Why did you increase equipment repair - you got rid of the old 293, repair costs should be going down

So let me give you the answers to all of these, and paraphrase what was discussed during the meeting:

vaccinations are a NFPA requirement, and these have been paid for by the fire district in the past, its just the first time its actually showed up as a line-item. Usually we "steal" money from other accounts, which is - generally speaking, a poor accounting practice. A better practice, obviously, is to have this money allocated from the start and earmarked for vaccinations
the building reserve was doubled because of the pending expectation of building maintenance as our facilities continue to age. We are seeing the beginnings of this with the Porter Corners fire station.
This is the first year that we *finally* started hose and pump testing - and we've discovered that a large portion of our hose inventory is no longer in working order. As a personal note, I am very proud of this addition to the budget, our volunteers should be worried about training, responding to calls, and returning home safely to their families, not testing hose.
The maintenance person was added to address the rising, and frankly, out of control maintenance costs of the district fleet. That being said, we can look into the feasibility and benefits of the position for future inclusion in the budget
Phones are just one of those pieces of equipment that you wish you had during an emergency - when you really need it, you are glad its there, but no one can truly predict when that will be. That being said, we should look at the phones across the district, and investigate the possibility of removing some of the less used (i.e. less critical) ones.
While EMS is around 65% of our call volume, the EMS line item is strictly for operating expenses - big purchases for equipment generally come out of the EMS reserve account, or equipment reserve account. So the line item is fairly misleading, and it is believed, is sufficient for that purpose.
As previously stated, equipment repair is a serious concern and expense of the fire district. That's why it was discussed to add a maintenance person to address that very concern. Some other ideas have been discussed openly by the officers and Commissioners including changing repair companies to use more local companies, and optimizing of the district fleet.

One final comment, the Board unofficially agreed during the meeting to remove the "maintenance person" from the budget based on this (and other) feedback. I personally believe that someday we will need such a position, but the timing is off considering the economy.

This means that you will *most likely* see a decrease in the tax rate for next year - albeit, not a large one, but one none the less. I do not however know of the exact figures at this point.

If you have any questions, please just let me know.

The 2010 GFD Budget

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 16:21:27 -0400

I have received some concerns and comments regarding the proposed 2010 budget. As reported in the newsletter, the proposed budget shows a 4% increase in funds.

THIS DOES NOT NECESSARILY MEAN A 4% TAX RAISE HOWEVER

In fact, the tax rate this year based on our calculations will be $0.97 cents per $1,000 and 2009's tax rate was $0.96 - virtually the same.

How can that be? Well it due to a few reasons - there is some high priced properties that have come onto the tax roles - which ultimately increases the assessed valuation of our tax rate, meaning that we have a larger amount of properties (amount) to generate revenue from. Another factor is that the Town of Wilton went to 100% valuation - meaning that the two equalization rates (between Wilton and Greenfield) are now the same.

On top of this, the process that determines how budgets are calculated (per NYS law) is a little "hokey" at times. When I became a Fire Commissioner it was one of those things that made my head spin when learning the process. For example, the idea of "equalization rate" is still crazy to me. "Equalization rates" are used to determine the rate one town should be taxed compared to another town. This is particularly important when a local government spans more than one town - such as the Greenfield Fire District, which spans both the Town of Greenfield and a portion of the Town of Wilton. So it could be the case that one town pays slightly "more" into the overall amount compared to another town simply because of the equalization rate.

Note that this is not the case this year, as both the Town of Greenfield and the Town of Wilton are at 100% eval.

As a side note, sometimes the data coming from the County isn't correct. We've had one case (I believe two years ago) where the assessments and equalization rates given to us from the county were changed after the budget was submitted - and this changed the tax rate (and in this case actually increased it).

I guess the point here is that there is a lot that goes into determining the budget, and I'm very proud to say that on our side of it I can proudly say that the Board of Fire Commissioners does a very sound and responsible effort into its creation.

If you want to hear all about our budget - I strongly encourage you to come to our public budget hearing on Tuesday October 20th at the Greenfield Center firehouse. The meeting starts at 7 pm.

In preparation for the meeting, you can view the proposed budget online at: http://www.greenfieldfd.org/documents/ProposedBudgetfor2010.pdf. (Note that the GFD posted budget information on our website before any neighboring fire district well before it was state law to do so - soemthing that I personally campaigned for)

As always, feel free to email me with any questions.

2009 Gear Fitting Schedule

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 13:08:34 -0400

All,

I have confirmed the 2009 gear fitting schedule with the district officers, it is as follows:

Tuesday, October 13th - Greenfield Center, 7 pm
Tuesday, October 20th - Middle Grove, 7 pm (Porter Corners firefighters get fitted here)
Tuesday, October 27th - Maple Avenue, 6 pm

Note that on the 27th, there is a four-company drill - which is why the fittings begin at 6 pm (instead of the standard 7 pm).

There will most likely not be additional fittings this year, so if you can't make your "home fitting" night, you are free to make the other nights - but please contact our purchasing agent to give her a friendly "heads up" that you are coming to the fitting.

This schedule is also posted in all four firehouses.

Any questions, just let me know!

Completed Truck Company Operations Course

Tue, 6 Oct 2009 23:32:11 -0400

I have completed the month long "Truck Company Operations" course. Special thanks to the Mechanicville Fire Department who hosted the course - and naturally, special thanks to Chief Myers from Schuylerville who taught the course.

For all my fellow firefighters, I strongly recommend taking this course - it was a great opportunity to practice a lot of the "basics" that we tend to take for granted.

I also was asked to "teach" a drill regarding ladder techniques - basically to regurgitate everything that was taught in the course, to my fellow firefighters who could not take it. I am glad to see that it was very well received and that I was able to help out my teammates.

For those who are curious, you can find out more about what "Truck Company Operations" is all about via Firehouse.com online training.

Saratoga County Advisory Board Rip and Run Presentation

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 22:45:23 -0400

I gave a presentation to the Saratoga County Fire Advisory Board regarding all the work we have done in the GFD extending the dispatching capabilities of our volunteer responders.

This is commonly referred to as the "Rip and Run" system, but perhaps, and more importantly, it should be referred to as an "extension" to the county "Rip and Run" system - as all of my work has been focused on extending its capabilities. I commonly refer to all this work as the "Rip and Run" system collectively, just because its easier to do.

Essentially I gave a very brief overview of the various efforts we've been doing here in the GFD: text messaging, voice-dialing, email and AIM instant messages - which have all been highlighted here before. But what was "revealed" for the first time during this presentation was the next step of this effort - and that is the "Rip and Run Display" initiative.

Currently in Saratoga County, there is no ability to add any automated GIS capabilities to our dispatching protocols. Many large municipal departments (FDNY, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.) have these types of systems - because they can afford them due to their large budgets. In Saratoga County however, our volunteer departments do not have the ability to spend that kind of money to purchase these types of systems.

Fortunately, there are free tools which provide acceptable (i.e. accurate) GIS capabilities - and if you have the skillset and capabilities - its really just a matter of putting them together to create a new product - one that we can use to enhance our dispatching.

Essentially, in developing the "Rip and Run Display", I wanted to provide the following four capabilities:

provide GIS capabilities: map and illustrate the exact location of the given emergency on a map and computer display. The obvious advantages of this are that you can easily identify where the incident location actually is. And if you think about this some more, you can easily identify just how significant this can be - for example, while I may know where a given road is, I do not necessarily know where the "123" address is located on that road. This could mean the difference between turning right or left at an intersection, a mistake that can cost precious minutes during an emergency.
provide driving directions: all departments participate in the County Mutual Aid plan, so its not unheard of that a northern Saratoga department gets called for help to a southern Saratoga department - or vice versa (this is particularly true during the bad weather season like during ice storms, etc.) I'll be the first one to admit that I couldn't begin to tell you where a given road was 6 districts south of me (and 20 miles away). Having the ability to print driving directions to a given address provides a significant advantage for mutual-aid calls.
provide pictures of destination (a.k.a. "street view"): its not hard to imagine the advantage to a responder that we are looking for a yellow house with green shutters rather than "123 Lincoln Blvd"
provide hydrant mapping capabilities: using a standard GPS unit (<$100) I was able to acquire the latitude and longitude for the majority (I am admitedly missing a few) of the fire hydrants in the GFD. Naturally, having a map with the specific locations of hydrants when you are responding to a fire provides a significant advantage when fighting a fire.

Here is a screen shot of the "Rip and Run Display" in action:

In the screenshot above (and you click to see a larger version), you will note a few interesting features of the system:

First and foremost, all the data from the county is readily displayed - things like the county run number, dispatcher notes, the call type and location.
There is also a call history listing (located on the left) so that a firefighter can query the system to see the last calls. The idea here is that if there was a previous call at the given location, you could possibly pull up information from the last time you were there - which could indeed be relevant.
The hydrant functionality is displayed in this screenshot, you'll not the "push pin" icons displayed around the various buildings in the "satellite" view.

But this just the beta version of the system, which is naturally due to change in the future, and I hope to begin field-testing by the end of the year. One final note, I am also experiementing with alternate layouts of the screen - based on available resolutions of the given monitor. You'll note that the current screenshot is in more of a square (traditional) monitor resolution - but "widescreen" monitors are becoming more and more prevelent, and so the layout of the display should take advantage of the extra monitor real-estate.

The ultimate goal of this project is to provide a "computer display" in each firehouse and ambulance company throughout the county. With current computer technology, the use of "touch screens" is becoming the norm, and this makes keyboards and mice (for the most part) unnecessary.

So a properly designed computer system with a touch-screen can be very intuitive, even for those who ordinarily wouldn't consider themselves "computer literate".

For example, a button on a screeen labeled "print directions" is both pretty self-explanatory and easy to use. And these computers are becoming very cheap - in fact, Dell has a variety of these types of computers starting at just $700.

So what has traditionally been out of reach for "rural volunteer fire departments" simply because of the cost ($$$) factor, has now become cheap and available - which was a very strong point I tried to focus on during my presentation.

You can download and view the presentation here:

Saratoga County Advisory Board Presentation (09-28-2009) (.ppsx 4.3Mb)
Optional (if you don't have PowerPoint): Microsoft Office Powerpoint Viewer

Eventually, I have a (hopefully relatively soon) goal to get up a "rip and run" section on this site - to more specifically go over the particulars of how my software works and it's design.

I am now actively investigating the potential to get this system installed at the county level - so that all fire and ems agencies in the county can benefit from the work that we have been pioneering in the GFD. More on this as details become available...

Any questions, just let me know.