Md. Fire, Emergency Response Times Could be Reevaluated

Jan. 11--Changes could be coming to the standards by which fire and emergency response teams are graded around the county.

At a meeting of the County Board of Commissioners on Thursday, representatives from the county's planning and public safety agencies asked the commissioners to consider amendments to the county's fire and emergency response standards, including expanding the amount of time considered acceptable for fire departments and cutting down on the acceptable percentage of times emergency medical service providers can be documented as late or nonresponsive to calls in order to be rated "adequate" by the county.

The fire and emergency response times are tied to the county's concurrency management standards, which are designed to prevent residential growth from proceeding at a rate that strains public facilities like schools, sewers, water and public safety. Each year, according to county code, a report is compiled by the county's Planning and Zoning Commission staff to assess the county's capacity to undertake more development and to make any recommendation for changes.

This year, Clayton Black, chief of development review for Carroll County, told the commissioners the only recommendation made by the staff is to amend the standards for fire and emergency medical services.

Currently, fire departments must reach the site of a call within eight minutes of receiving the call to be considered "adequate," Scott Campbell, director of the county Department of Public Safety told the commissioners, "Approaching inadequate" means departments are responding within eight to 10 minutes of a call, and "inadequate" means departments take longer than 10 minutes to arrive on-scene."

The recommended changes Campbell presented to the board would adjust those times to under 10 minutes for an "adequate" response, between 10 and 12 minutes for "approaching inadequate" and 12 minutes or more for "inadequate."

The change, Campbell said, reflects the role of safety mechanisms, like sprinkler systems, automatically installed in a lot of new development play in expanding the amount of time a fire department needs to get to the scene of a fire.

For emergency services, the changes would come in the criteria that measures the percentage of times a department is considered late or unresponsive.

The "adequate" standard would change from less than 15 percent combined late and nonresponses and less than 4 percent nonresponses to less than 12 percent combined and less than 2 percent nonresponses. Late and nonresponses equal to or greater than 12 percent would be considered "approaching inadequate" or "inadequate," Campbell said.

All of the proposed changes, he said, have been approved by the Carroll County Volunteer Emergency Services Association, and the Planning and Zoning Commission. Furthermore, he said, none of the changes would place any of the county's emergency responders into the "inadequate" category. None of the county's emergency responders are currently rated "inadequate," he said.

"There was a very clear need identified to revisit this criteria," Campbell told the board, adding that the standards had not been changed for several years.

"The criteria that's in place now has never been looked at or revised to reflect changes that have occurred."

But several commissioners were not convinced, deciding to revisit the issue in February, instead of approving any changes and putting the matter to public hearing.

"We've to make sure that we are providing the service" people need, said Commissioner Stephen Wantz, R-District 1, who requested that Campbell provide the board in February with national averages for response times. "The demand is not going down, that's the problem."

heather.norris@carrollcountytimes.com

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