A report from the Palo Alto Fire Fighters’ union released Feb. 6 revealed that the city’s Fire Department responds to emergencies efficiently on a general basis but suffers from certain deficiencies.

The Fire Services Utilization and Resources Study report said the Fire Department “has become a stagnant organization and management is struggling, due in part to insufficient support staff.”

Although the overall assessment of the Palo Alto Fire Department was positive, TriData Division, the consultants with whom the union worked to publish the report, listed 48 recommendations for improvement. Areas of concern included the training and development of officers, the need to merge two fire stations and combining some fire administrative functions, wrote assistant city manager Pamela Antil in an e-mail to The Daily.

The 190-page study also said the lapse between dispatch time and turnout time—how long it takes for equipment to be ready for use at the emergency site—was too long.

Palo Alto Professional Firefighters’ Union president Tony Spitaleri is confident that recommendations on resource sharing could be put into effect immediately, but he said improving reaction times would require additional studies and observations of their impact on Palo Alto neighborhoods.

“We have a minimum requirement of people on duty… we want to look if that has an impact on how resources are deployed,” Spitaleri said. “This is an issue that needs a lot of discussion. When you start reducing staffing level, the number of folks who respond to emergencies [or] when you start reducing physicians, you put firefighters and citizens in jeopardy.”

In addition, Spitaleri emphasized the importance of improving dispatch, a problem area that will be crucial for serving the rising number of emergencies. The report shows medical calls increased by nearly 50 percent since 2000.

“There needs to be more flexibility in analyzing and disarming more type of units in an emergency,” Spitaleri said. “We don’t have a system in place that allows us to do this on a consistent basis. We’re looking at investing money into this process.”

He added that the city is working to fill more positions in the upper management level of the Fire Department.

“Fire marshal positions were not filled, [which] has caused the deterioration of our programs to move forward,” Spitaleri said. “The workload fell on the shoulders of a handful of people.”

“We’re not as efficient as we could be,” he said.

But Antil insists that feedback from the city council, firefighters and public were positive about resolving these issues. He noted that many of the recommended changes could be made without affecting the city’s existing union agreement.

“[These] will be a launching point of continued dialogue between the firefighters and city administration,” Antil said.