Gilroy’s Firefighters Association says staffing shortages at one of their stations is impacting patient outcome and their ability to control fires.
According to a letter put out by the association, sometimes there's two firefighters at the Santa Teresa Station, and other times there’s none.
“It's not a good situation to be in, we depend on this emergency personnel to be able to respond quickly, in life and death situations,” said Gilroy resident Krishna Kadali
The Gilroy Firefighters Association said the station needs to be open 24/7 to provide an equitable response and that means they need more firefighters.
“EMS-related emergencies, cardiac arrests, if we don’t get there on time the patient outcome is not good, so that’s why we need a paramedic to show up within that adopted seven minutes and 30 seconds to have good patient outcomes,” said Steven Hayes, Gilroy’s Firefighters Association president.
Another concern is their ability to stop the spread of fires.
But in a letter sent to the community, Gilroy’s city administrator and fire chief say staffing levels are connected to demand at each station.
A graph in that letter shows the Santa Teresa Station only responds to 6% of the city’s calls, but the firefighters association says those numbers are off.
“In that March, April and May, this station was closed down roughly 82% of the time, there was no one here, I believe that 6% is coming from whenever a fire engine staffed here responds to a call in this district,” said Hayes.
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Based on the latest city budget, the station should be fully staffed by November of next year.
Fully staffing it now, could mean higher taxes or cuts to other services, according to the city administrator and fire chief.
“We just went through the budget process if that was an issue that should have been brought up,” said Rebecca Armendariz of the Gilroy City Council.
Armendarez says she was in the dark about the current staffing situation.
“We’re already short one station for our population and also to be compliant with response times, we really should be working on getting on that fifth station rather than having to work on this one as well,” she said.
The city council is expected to discuss the staffing at this fire station and what the budget looks like, next week.
