The International City/County Management Association recently announced an audio conference for city and county managers called, “Asking Your Police and Fire Chief the Right Questions — to Get the Right Answers.”
The ad asked, “How many police and firefighters do you really need? How well are your public safety departments performing? Are ‘officers [firefighters] per 1,000′ and ‘number of calls’ really meaningful measures?” Government managers want to know how and why they should fund public safety the way fire chiefs want them to, so they are us to establish and use management practices that produce “meaningful” measures.
Recently Fire Chief Tom Carr of Montgomery County, Md., faced this new but relevant challenge. A new county executive and chief administrative officer changed the face of performance measures and created a county service performance system that was, in reality, the department head’s personal performance plan.
Carr’s management staff held several intense discussion and planning sessions to develop in just over two week what the new system identified as three to five headline, or essential, measures. These measures were chosen for their ability to reflect many of the department’s efforts and resources and their effects. One example is the time-honored measure “percent of fires confined to the room of origin.” While this is not a new measure, it shows a number of components that affect how the service manages fire risk.
I recall first reading about this measure in the early fire service measurement manual, Procedures for Improving the Measurement of Local Fire Protection Effectiveness. This seminal work by Phil Scheanman, John R. Hall Jr. and others, published by NFPA, is as relevant today as when it was released in the mid 1970s.
Analyzing a measure such as how often we are successful at confining fire can address many dimensions of service. Consider that the following factors have an affect on an area of service depending on how it is applied. If residents fail to notify the fire department of a fire and fight it until it becomes unmanageable, the fire grows. If the 911 and dispatch function takes too long to prepare a fire call, the fire can grow. If you do not have enough fire resources or they are too far apart, response time increases and your fire can grow. If you do not have well-trained staff or have too few of them, their tactical work can be ineffective and the fire can grow. On the other hand if you have robust public education and an aggressive fire sprinkler ordinance, you may be able to reduce the risk of fire or control it before it reaches flashover. So this measure can help you see how well you are doing.
In the case of Montgomery County’s measures, the government next implemented a program where department chiefs would need to come before the chief administrative officer and other county executive staff to discuss statistical factors of performance. This program, known as County Stat, can focus on data from the performance measures or choose key areas of problems or risk. Like New York City’s Com Stat program, the focus is on improvement and accountability. Montgomery County’s program is billed to be less confrontational than the famous days of grilling New York’s police commanders.
All this effort at looking at and studying how services are delivered is intended to sustain on environment of excellence and to focus on using resources in the most efficient way and applied to the most important needs. Ultimately the vision is to create a performance based budget where the chiefs would be required to offer evidence of results for how they are using funds.
Looking at recent changes to the U.K. fire service, one can see an influence of performance-based budgeting. Concerned with an increase in life and property loss from fire, the United Kingdom has committed more focused management of the risk. Consequently they have reprogrammed funding and staffing from a more reactionary operational response to one where it focuses on reducing risk through aggressive outreach education and evaluation. This could be one result of a performance and results focused approach here.
We’ll see where this program of measurement goes but with tight economic times you can bet that executive governmental managers will continue to receive scrutiny over how resources are allocated and what results are achieved from them.
