Southern Fauquier Town Hall - 11 April 2012

I had the opportunity to finally attend the monthly town hall being put on by the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors (Mr. Stribling and Mr. Sherbyn specifically) this past Wednesday, April 11.  Several people were in attendance and several people spoke for a few minutes.  This included 1) Fauquier County Fire and Rescue, 2) Delegate Michael Webert, 3) Captain Meadows of the sheriff's dispatch center, and 4) Mr. Fisher, the commonwealth attorney for our area.  One at a time now!


1) Fauquier County Fire and Rescue
The only name I was able to catch was Thomas Billington.  He presented a 4 page summary of the report presented to the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors (FCBOS) about current volunteer staffing of EMS and Fire equipment, average response time for all the fire stations in the county (comes in at 10.3 minutes from call to first-on-the-scene), summary of the funding for personnel from the FCBOS, and a estimated projection of what the average response time would be given the new personnel.
A key note is that the FCBOS has approved an increase in funding to hire the 22 requested positions.  The discussion briefly touched on how the fire chiefs hope to improve response time especially during the 4AM to 6AM window when most volunteers need to head off to work and prefer not to respond to calls (more and more employers are less tolerant of employees missing time at work for volunteer fire work).
I have requested the full 26-page report from Mr. Billington and hope to have another post here soon to break down their request.  I also hope to hold their feet to the fire and show actuals vs. the projected response times after the proposed staffing levels have been achieved.


2) Delegate Michael Webert
Delegate Webert stopped by and gave his ear for the whole meeting (there was a chance that if the meeting ran long that he would have to drop out to support a conference call--that didn't occur), speaking only in summary of his on-going work for a few minutes.
He focused on a few items going into the budget including funding for schools and funding for a (from what I understood) new Virginia state-level grant program to support growing businesses.  Mr. Webert was especially excited for the prospects this presents for the local agriculture initiatives.

3) Captain Meadows
Captain Meadows spoke for a few minutes about his call and dispatch center.  He runs the 911 hotlines as well as the 540-347-3300 non-emergency line for the county.  From what I gathered from his talk:

• he has currently 19 employees, 
• he has elevated funding to bring this up to 24 full time employees, 
• there are 6 call terminals which can be staffed at any given point in time
• last year there were 157,000 calls.  That is an average of 18 calls per hour all year long. 
• This number (if I recall properly) has increased by 300%+ over the past 12 years while staffing has only increased 18%.
• This increase was attributed mainly to cell phone service and (per his example) of receiving 25-30 calls for an accident on I-66 rather than the pre-2000 era of 1 or 2 calls.
• The past 2 years he has had employee turn-over of 25% and 28% (approximately 5 people per year)
• I had to grill Captain Meadows to get him to answer some questions about this turn-over rate, which he seemed reluctant or possibly annoyed to be answering. I am unsure of the reasons for this.
• It costs about $52,000 to train a new employee
• It takes about 9 months to get a new employee up to full-capability
• Since it felt like pulling teeth, I decided not to pursue what the average employment length was for his department
• He claimed (I hope I'm not reading too far into his words) that this turn-over rate was caused because of the stress associated with the work and with the long hours, poor scheduling circumstances (someone always has to be there, even if the scheduled person gets sick), and the need to request vacation 30 days in advance.

To me, it seems like there may be a bit of room for improvement here.  If you project out the cost for only training the new employees, simply because people quit, the county has spent an extra $520k over the past 2 years.  Hopefully in this time of flat-lined budgets this department will be able to control these training costs. Even if they decided to give out bonuses to the employees who stayed for a given year, or require a 2 or 5-year employment contract for new-hires, there would be a great amount of savings!

4) Mr. Fisher
Attorney Fisher spoke for a few minutes about his budget situation and how he has been able to creatively find ways for more funding. He is looking to bring down to the local-level the collection of over-due fines which previously has occurred at the state-level.  

He mentioned that part of this move was because that the state would:

• automatically write-off and not even attempt to collect 2/3rds of the fines/fees
• take a fee off of any fines actually collected

Mr. Fisher stated that he will be able to fully support the newly requested personnel to perform these collection duties with the extra funding received because of the locally more efficient methods.
I commend Mr. Fisher and his office for the creative findings.




Well, that is all.  I hope to have some future posts going into some more detail about these items where possible.  The next FCBOS Town Hall is the second Wednesday in May (the 9th) in Catlett (location forthcoming once I clarify with some people).


-TFCR