A Fire master plan has been approved by County of Grande Prairie council after a consultant’s report made several short, medium, and long-term suggestions as to how the service can look to improve its level of overall service.
Community Services Director Dan Lemieux says while the service was credited for its work to date in the idea behind the report is to help create a service that is more effective and efficient.
He says some of the critical suggestions, which are recommended to be implemented within a year, include performance measures.
“It talks to what level of service do we provide, but it also includes performance measures; how many units are going to respond to certain calls, how many firefighters are we going to have on certain calls, and what is our target response time,” he says.
“We aren’t measuring at this time, so what the consultant is saying, you need to have a standard of cover, but it also needs to include performance measures,” he adds.
Lemieux says the plan also has a number of recommendations that have financial impacts, including the more in-depth lifecycle and replacement process when it comes to major pieces of fire infrastructure.
“We have a process, where through our operating budget, we put money aside in our reserve so that we have it set aside when it’s time to replace a fire engine, for example, which can be very expensive,” he says.
“It’s important we put money aside so it doesn’t end up being a big hit on the tax base if we have reserve money that we can allocate to some of those purchases, it minimizes the potential impact.”
Lemieux says while they continue to pour over recommendations, all decisions which could contain those financial implications will
come back to council before progressing.
