Good morning, everyone.
Thanks for being here.
I, this is such a great morning and there is nothing but positive about what we're here to talk about.
And I am so proud to be standing here in this firehouse, but also with the Seattle Fire Department and Seattle Police Department as we announce new investments in our upcoming 2020 budget.
to both support our first responders and to expand the medical treatment available for our city's most vulnerable communities.
The investments that we're announcing today will help ensure that Seattle firefighters and police officers can devote most of their time to emergency calls and providing relief for those non-emergency health care, behavioral health, and substance abuse issues in our growing city.
We know that there are not enough resources to address the very real increased demand for non-emergency, but very important calls.
You know, as our city grows, we have a responsibility to ensure that our ability to deliver emergency and non-emergency services keeps pace.
We must better serve some of our most vulnerable neighbors on their healthcare, behavioral health, and substance use disorder issues.
And we know that there's an increasing demand for non-emergency calls, but not enough tools to deal with those calls.
And when our first responders have to focus on non-emergency issues, it gives them less time and less resources to devote their energies to those emergency issues that are most pressing, like structure files, vehicle collisions, and true emergency situations on our streets.
We are announcing four key new investments today in our 2020 budget to support our first responders while at the same time ensuring that the dedicated and specially trained medical professionals are able to provide the treatment and services that we need on our streets.
This allows us to free up critical resources for those emergency calls.
The first one we're doing and that it's so exciting to announce is that we want to make sure our first responders are best equipped to help our most vulnerable communities, some of whom have behavioral health and substance abuse issues.
As part of my proposed budget, we will invest over $400,000 to enhance the HealthONE program we announced earlier this year.
And here's an example of what the people of Seattle are going to see on the streets.
Earlier this year, Councilmember Bagshaw, Fire Chief Scoggins and I announced the city's first ever HealthONE unit, which will deploy in October.
HealthONE is a team of specially trained firefighters and a civilian specialist who can help respond to 911 calls.
And how important is it?
In 2018 alone, 42% of the Seattle Fire Department's calls were determined to be non-emergency calls.
The more we can relieve those calls, we can have our firefighters focus on the true emergencies.
It's clear that we must continue to invest in treatment for non-emergency cases in our growing urban environment.
And we were the leader in the country on developing Medic One.
When it started, people didn't even know how significant it would be.
And soon Seattle was deemed the best place in America to have a heart attack.
We now take that for granted when Medic One rolls.
Health One is a whole new approach to make sure we have that same level of immediate services for those non-emergency bases, but they're part of a growing city.
And I really have to give a huge amount of credit, not just to Council Member Bagshaw for being so persistent on pushing to have these kinds of services, but Kenny Stewart and the local firefighters, they know from their work what we need on the streets.
And this idea grew out of them seeing what we needed and I just have to tip my hat for them to not just have the idea, to bring it to a reality here.
And Chief Scoggins who is really a visionary leader and Chief Best working with him to say, how do we really address public safety in a holistic fashion?
How do we make sure our first responders, our police officers and our firefighters truly can respond mostly to those emergencies on the street and find other ways to deal with the non-emergency but ever-growing issue in our city?
Right now, another investment we're going to make is on mental health professionals that will work with the Seattle Police Department.
Right now, we have one.
one mental health professional in all of the Seattle Police Department.
And in the last seven years, that police department has remade itself to show how it can deal with use of force and crisis intervention.
We dealt with so many crisis intervention calls last year, our Seattle Police Department officers, showing up, responding, doing the right thing, being able to interact with people.
But they can only be helped by making sure that we have mental health professionals to help and assist in situations and our officers for doing their job.
As we continue to build the best community-based police department in the country, under the best chief in the country, and as we see landmark progress for the Seattle Police Department's response to people in crisis, we know we have to give more resources.
That's why we were proposing in my budget another $310,000 to fund four new mental health professionals to support the Seattle Police Department's Crisis Intervention Unit.
And in simple terms, this new investment will make sure that we have a mental health professional in every single precinct across this city.
We need to give the people, the officers, all of us that level of support.
And I'm very excited and I want to really give credit to the chief for having the enthusiasm, but the leadership to know what her troops needed and what the city needed to be having the best community based police department.
So thank you, chief.
We also know that there's a number of other things we have to be doing to try to relieve that burden off our 911 systems and take those non-emergency crisis calls to a place they can be dealt with by medical professionals.
We know that a number of those non-emergency calls end up burdening the system in a number of ways.
The call does two things.
Number one, it'll pull resources from what are true emergencies.
And two, it puts into motion a whole series of events on an emergency response when sometimes that's not the right response.
To remedy this, we are relaunching a very successful Seattle Fire Department and Downtown Emergency Services Center pilot, which we tried earlier, called Nurses Line.
We are going to have a 24-7 Nurses Line, where non-emergency medical issues can be appropriately addressed by the staff in a comprehensive manner.
This nursing line is going to be exclusively for our permanent supportive housing and our shelter staff to call in those times when they have someone in their shelter or in their housing who's in crisis but yet may not need an emergency response.
We saw this had a tremendous positive impact on both reducing the number of calls to police or Seattle Fire Department, but just as importantly, a huge positive impact on the people living in those shelters and struggling with those challenges.
Building off the nurses line, we will invest also $650,000 to hire dedicated nurses, dedicated nurses to be present at our largest shelters and our three largest permanent supported housing sites.
Those are some of our highest 911 traffic places.
More emergency calls from those areas.
By now dedicating medical professionals on staff during those hours when most of those calls happen, we hope to give immediate relief to the people that need those services and reduce the calls to 911. This expansion will allow some of our most vulnerable communities to receive the care and attention they need in a more rapid fashion and then we can determine if there really is an emergency.
Does someone need to be taken to the hospital?
Then we can do that.
But do they just need to be connected to family or to case managers or to some other services?
I do, again, really want to thank Fire Chief Scoggins and our Police Chief, Carmen Best.
Also, our Human Services Division has been tremendous in this.
I really want to thank, where'd you go?
Jason, there you are.
Jason, for all your work.
You know, we are working tirelessly to really address all the challenges we have in this city.
And one of those foremost challenges is the increase of people experiencing homelessness.
And with that, an increase in the behavioral health challenges we've seen.
Together, working together across the city, we know that we can and have done better and will continue to do better.
The teams at the Seattle Fire Department, the Seattle Police Department, and the Human Services Division are every day thinking about how do we work together with our public health partners, with our frontline providers to see how we can move things forward.
I also want to thank Sally Bagshaw.
We don't get many more months of her, and she is making the best of it.
But her vision for doing all we can to intercede in a positive way for those people who may need more help but don't need an emergency response has truly been remarkable.
Thank you for that, Councilman Bakeshaw.
I also want to just note before I turn over the mic, today is September 11th.
And every September 11th for me, I remember, I have searing memories of what happened in 2001. And it is so clear in my mind, I can close my eyes and see the towers on fire and falling.
I can remember the crashes in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
I remember that sense of terrible disquiet, not knowing where we were going as a country.
And I also remember the enormous bravery of our first responders.
People who could have run the other way, could have cared for themselves, but rushed towards literally the burning buildings.
sacrificed themselves and those who survived to this very day fighting health issues that this nation owes them as a debt.
And I say that because my son, my younger son, was only a few months old when that happened.
He is 18 now and has almost no memories of 9-11.
That's why it is incumbent upon each one of us that as we move forward to remember that that was such a searing moment in American history.
And how we respond as a nation defines us.
And one of the ways we respond is to make sure that our first responders have the tools they need today, not just to do their jobs, to make sure that we take care of their health and their family's health, to commit ourselves as a nation to make sure that those first responders will have our support, and they will have our gratitude.
They have mine as mayor of the city and as a proud American to know that we had that.
So I look forward to working with the city council to pass these parts of our budget, but really want to again thank all the people who are serving our country Thank Kenny Stewart and all of his troops for having every day showing up and thinking, how do we do this better?
And we get this awesome new program.
To thank Carmen Best and everyone serving in the Seattle Police Department who also show up every day saying, how do we make this a better city?
And so with that, I will give you our wonderful best fire chief in the nation, Harold Scoggins.
Thank you, Mayor Durkin, for your ongoing support.
It's tremendous for the men and women of the Seattle Fire Department.
Also, Council Member Bagshaw, thank you.
All the meetings we've had, all the conversations we've had, we wouldn't be here without you.
And Chief Best, you know, we had a chance to spend some time together this morning at the Space Needle raising the flag, remembering those who were lost on 9-11.
Because that's a day that impacted this profession pretty hard across this country and across the world.
But your ongoing partnership means a great deal.
As the mayor said, we know the demand for addressing low acuity calls in our community is high.
The mayor mentioned 42% of our documented medical calls were low acuity.
Well, what does 42% equal?
That equals about 30,000 responses a year.
That's a big impact when you think about this equipment going up and down the streets of the city with lights and sirens with something that's not a true medical emergencies.
These dispatch fire engines or aid calls are generally, it's generally a no action.
We get there, we do an assessment, and we figure it out that they're not in need of acute life-saving measures, but they are in need of some other things.
And that's what we know this will help with in the future.
I regularly talk to my counterparts around King County and around the nation about the challenges that they're also facing.
And they're all similar.
February 7th of this year, we invited 25 fire departments from around the nation, and we had a one-day conference on one topic.
That was this topic.
Our law acuity manager, John Ehrenfeld, he's been to Seattle, to D.C., and many stops in between to see and understand what's going on.
This is a crisis in the fire service.
The fire service has become a part of America's healthcare system, but we haven't formally recognized that.
This is a step in that right direction.
All that's to say is we've done our homework, we've researched what works and what doesn't by talking to those in the county, those around the nation.
We needed an innovative system to help us solve this issue.
We know innovation lives here.
49 years ago, Paramedicine was born in this country.
Now it's normal around the world.
Next year, March 7, 2020, we'll be celebrating our 50th anniversary of providing paramedic services to the community.
But now you go around the world, it's normal.
This will probably be that same way in the future.
The launching of the HealthONE program is one piece of the puzzle.
The program will immensely increase our ability to meet the needs of our patients by connecting with them with the appropriate services.
We can look beyond the traditional methods of transporting patients to the emergency room.
We as firefighters, we know that that doesn't work.
We take a lot of people to the emergency room and many times our firefighters watch them walk right out the door.
Now we're going to have the ability to connect them with the appropriate services.
If we encounter an individual that's having a substance abuse problem, we can connect them to a crisis team or treatment services.
If we encounter an individual that has social needs and needs a warm place to stay, we can get them to a shelter, we can transport them to another place where they can get the services they need.
If someone has a non-emergency medical need, such as a minor cut or lower back pain, and the older I get, the more lower back pain I have, we can get them where they need to be.
We can get them a medical appointment, we can get them to an urgent care, or we can get them some case management to help them out.
You know, and that's really important because these are not life-threatening 911 emergencies.
We've outfitted one of our Suburbans to serve as our first HealthONE unit.
This unit will be operational next month in October, serving the community.
The HealthONE unit will be staffed with two firefighters and I can't tell you how excited I am about the excitement from the men and women of this organization who applied to be a part of this innovative new service that we'll be providing.
We'll also be partnered with a social worker and I can't thank Jason Johnson and Human Services Department enough because their ongoing partnerships in this space has been so important for our success.
We have a vulnerable adult program.
We have a case manager that's inside the Seattle Fire Department that helps us with our high utilizing patients.
All these things really help us provide a better service.
Launching this program would not be possible without the support of our mayor.
Her ongoing support is tireless for the Seattle Fire Department, Council Member Bagshaw, you know, the conversations and her understanding, the issues.
I know she's asked me for a lot of information and I give it to her, but I better read it before I give it to her because I know there's going to be a Q&A behind it.
The tremendous partnership with Local 27, President Kenny Stewart is here with us this morning.
We talk about these things, he talk about these things with his local presidents around the country and all of our council members and the community for your ongoing support in hearing and understanding what our needs are.
And Jason Johnson and all of our partner agencies who are here with us this morning to kick this off really means a lot.
We're inside of UGM on a regular basis.
We're inside of DESC on a regular basis.
All these non-profits and all of our non-profit partners, they know that we're trying to provide the best service to this community.
This is a step in the right direction.
So thank you for your support and we're excited about where we're going.
And please remember 2020, 50 years anniversary of our paramedic program.
Let's look forward to 50 years of our mobile integrated health program, HealthONE.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Chief.
And before I turn it over to Chief Best, I do want to call out our frontline providers who are standing here with us.
Every day, the people in our emergency response system are working not just tirelessly, but doing some of the hardest work there is in the city.
I think there might be clones of Dan Malone who's behind me because I swear he is everywhere at all the times doing as many positive things as he can.
But it is working with UGM and with Hopelink and with Patty at our King County Health, working together to say, how do we have a holistic response?
Because that's the only response that will provide true public safety.
And with that, I'm going to turn it over to our chief, Carmen Best.
Well good afternoon everybody.
I'm so honored and glad to be here in the same place where our downtown lip sync took place not that long ago.
But I just want to say that it's such an honor and thank you mayor for everything that you've said and everything that you've done.
The mayor's support of our police department, of the fire department has been so tremendous.
Policies, procedures, retention, training, budget, all of the things that we need to make sure that we can effectively do our work as public safety first responders.
And to Fire Chief Harold Scoggins, who we talk all the time, he is an advocate for public safety.
We partner in so many cities, the police and fire maybe have some tension, but he and I work together all the time because it is so important, the safety of both our men and women who work for us, but of course of the safety of the city and he is absolutely ideal and a wonderful partner and thank you very much.
And really, as the mayor said to everyone who's up here, one thing that we know is that we're all in this together and none of us is going to solve any of these issues alone.
So it's really important that we stand side by side and join a unity to let you know how important these issues are to us and to recognize the advancements that we're making.
Since the Seattle Police Department has been tracking numbers for crisis contacts for the last several years, It's going up every single year.
Last year it went up 12% and it shows no sign of decreasing.
We know that we're going to continue to respond to these critical calls for crisis.
For the past decade, the Seattle Police Department has been working hard to get our officers trained crisis intervention and we established a crisis response unit and almost three-fourths of our officers have advanced crisis training and de-escalation training for every single officer who responds to a call in this city.
But with that we know that we have more work to do.
Our crisis response unit has been working diligently.
We had one, as the mayor mentioned, one mental health professional assigned.
A city of 750,000 people, over 16,000 crisis calls, and we had one mental health person assigned.
So mayor, I just thank you so much for supporting us and getting more people.
Thanks to Mayor Durkin, we will add four additional mental health professionals to work alongside are highly trained police officers.
This means that we will have an officer and a mental health professional in every single precinct of the city to respond to help us with calls for service.
These specialized teams may be called to complex incidents where they will bring additional skills and expertise, including advanced de-escalation to support a peaceful resolution.
As the mayor has mentioned many times before, our response to these really critical calls, we use force in less than 2% of those calls, a great improvement of where we were even five years ago.
We have the tools and training to assess patients, connect them with case managers, and community-based service providers for extended care and treatment.
Additionally, these specialized teams will focus on patients who present the highest likelihood of imminent harm to themselves and to others.
And you only need to look in the paper and to see we've had cases where we needed to have additional intervention with some of these folks.
So this will help us have better responses to those folks.
And we also want to make sure that it reduces the number of frequent callers for our 911 services.
This investment affords us the opportunity to expand our outreach to additional patients and redirect them to the appropriate options and support and support systems that they need.
Our goal is to improve public safety in the community, especially for our most vulnerable people.
It is important that we partner together and remain in partnership to do this.
Again, I thank everyone that's here.
I thank the mayor for supporting us, Chief Scoggins, Kenny, all of our service providers.
You know, Patty from our public health and everyone here who's helped us so much immensely.
Jason Johnson, you've heard all the names, but I just want to make sure that I reiterate it because it's so important to us.
This is very crucial and I'm very excited about it.
So thank you for allowing me a few minutes to take your time.
Thank you very much.
All right, well, first of all, I'm going to improvise a little bit.
And this has happened to me before where I ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
But before I begin, I'd like to ask every police officer and firefighter to come and stand behind us here while I make my remarks.
Because as a union president, it's not about me.
It's about we.
And everything that I've done and my executive board has done to not only bring Health one to reality, but to work to better our services in this city is through the experiences every single day of firefighters and police officers on the street who are making a difference.
And it's through them, I'm often a mouthpiece, and I'm sometimes a megaphone to make those differences, and this is one example of that.
Thanks for stepping up here.
They hate cameras, so that was a big ask on my behalf.
So we're really excited and my name is Kenny Stewart.
I'm proud to be a 23-year veteran as a firefighter with the Seattle Fire Department.
Currently serving as a lieutenant on Ladder Company 8 in Ballard.
I'm also honored to serve as a president of Seattle Firefighters Union Local 27, of the IFF, representing 1,000 of the country's best firefighters and paramedics.
And I as well, before I say anything further, want to acknowledge this solemn day, September 11th.
We must never forget the sacrifices that were made by police firefighters, police officers, and other first responders as a result of that terrorist attack.
Those men and women died helping others.
That's why we're here today.
We're talking about a new program that's about helping others.
And it's our job as firefighters, but I also think as a community and as a country, to make sure that remembering 9-11 isn't just a bumper sticker, it's something we actually do.
First of all, I want to thank Mayor Durkan for her leadership in making public safety a priority in the city of Seattle.
That's my mission as union president number one and as firefighters is public safety.
I really appreciate that.
We knew that and that's why we support her.
Thank you also to Fire Chief Scoggins and Chief Best for their continued advocacy.
in support of more resources to do our job and to protect the public.
And finally, Council Member Bagshaw, for her resolute efforts to make Seattle a safe and healthy place to live for everyone.
So today, Mayor Durkan is announcing additional investments and practical solutions to the crisis on our streets that will be effective and also support firefighters in doing our job dealing with that community and every other community.
For example, HealthONE right here will address low-acuity responses and connect individuals directly with the services that they need so that firefighters can focus on the time-critical, life-threatening emergencies that we're trained and prepared for.
I do want to give a shout-out as well to John Ehrenfeld and Roger Weber, somewhere behind me.
They were also instrumental in making this happen.
They also represented firefighters at this station, Station 2, and at Station 10, who up until the time that we put this on the streets, have been carrying that load, responding to this community, and doing the best we could with the resources we had.
So John, the members of Station 10, and the members of Station 2, and all of our members who come down here and work, really deserve our thanks for carrying the ball this far.
The expansion of the SPD crisis response unit and the onsite medical support at our busiest shelters and the other facilities will be able to deliver effective care directly to patients and reduce the often inefficient and unnecessary impacts on our emergency system.
These are solid, common sense programs that will be successful.
We know this because firefighters have been on the front lines of working with the homeless, the mentally ill, the drug addicted, and anybody else on the streets that isn't having a run-of-the-mill fire, heart attack, or building collapse since the beginning of our department.
Somebody got it, okay.
Firefighters do have a unique perspective and expertise that comes with serving this population 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So I really especially appreciate the inclusion of the fire department and the police department in the formation of these programs.
So often we see people who are actually delivering services left out of the equation.
And I have to tip my hat to our elected officials and our fire chief and police chief for making sure that the folks who are delivering those services are part of creating this solution.
So as a 23-year veteran of the fire department and a resident of this city, I'm proud, and our members are proud, to support these proposals that the Mayor has set forward as part of her 2020 budget proposal.
These common sense initiatives will prioritize public safety, they're going to deliver appropriate services, and they will save lives.
Thank you very much.
I think now we will take media questions and maybe the two chiefs and Kenny you want to get closer and Sally just in case they're addressed to you as well.
As you have heard from so many communities, there are people in communities who say it's very difficult to get a police officer if a car is broken into or if a house is burglarized.
Those responses can take a very long time.
Will this program make it more possible to have quicker responses for some of the other things that police are holding?
I absolutely believe it's going to have an effect, as we've all been saying.
The fact of the matter is we want to be able to respond to priority calls and calls for service quicker.
We want to streamline the ability to get there.
And obviously having the ability to address some of these longer-term calls, calls for crisis calls, will help us.
Everything we can do to help is going to make a difference here.
So I'm very glad for that part of it, yes.
The proposals that came out yesterday regarding expanding funding for the police, about half of that is for strategy materials for training, $800,000.
What is that going to be spent on?
Is that consultant funding?
What is that going towards?
I'm not sure specifically, but what you're asking is what is the
Ask it again, one more time, but I understand it.
We'll get you the exact budget detail on that.
So there's a whole range of things as we addressed at yesterday's press conference when we did this report.
A lot of that is contained in the report on doing a very intensive look at how do we both recruit, train, and keep people on board.
So we'll get you the details on that, Erica.
Thank you.
The health one unit that was going to be a pilot to start.
Are we have you decided that it's looking good enough to expand?
Why not sort of wait for that pilot play out before adding more money?
I think it's gonna be both.
We looked at the data in terms of what the need is.
Um, and we're we're projecting now through.
We know what our 911 call is in the low acuity calls.
We're gonna be keeping very close tabs on getting the data as it rolls out, but there is clear that there's a need for more.
And so we wanted to make sure that we had planned in this budget the ability to do that.
Do we know what that enhanced would look like?
Is it another staff member or another unit?
I think we don't know.
Chief, do you want to talk about that?
Sure.
So what we know right now is we're going to put two firefighters on the social worker.
And we know the population that we're trying to serve.
What we know is we're going on about 200 homeless type calls a week.
We know we're going on 16 to 20 overdoses a week.
So we know there's a call load for it.
And we're going to run the program and manage it and build our relationships with our partners.
And then in a few months figure out, can we put a second unit in service?
If so, What would the parameters be?
Do we need to change the parameters of the first unit?
So we're building it, but we're gonna be serving the community as we're building it.
Mayor Durbin, can I ask, and I apologize, I understand that you're going to be having a lot of these events and we can't all go to all of them, but I'm curious how much of the policy announced yesterday was based on the survey of 76 police officers and how much was based on other factors?
It was a whole range of factors, and we'll make sure you get a copy of the report because it details what we did in that, but we looked both at, we surveyed officers in every precinct, we looked at data, we looked at what the national trends were, We looked across kind of what the best HR practices were in police departments and other places.
So it was a holistic view of all those practices.
We're seeing the same trend line in almost every major police department across this country.
It is getting harder to recruit and harder to retain good officers.
We want to make sure that as we've remade our Seattle Police Department, that we have, number one, the resources to serve our growing city, but also that we can recruit those officers who are going to implement the exact kind of strategies for a community-based police department.
So to do that, we have to have very focused strategies, both on who to reach and how to keep them.
The nurses in the service centers are, from my understanding, responding to a need of a homeless population that is getting older and sicker, generally, beyond just sort of putting, I mean, five nurses is something, but it's probably not going to address that systemic problem.
What can be done for a more system-wide way of addressing that moderation.
You're exactly right, David, and the reporting that you and others have done on that, I think, points to a really significant issue that we have in this city and across this country, that as people experiencing homelessness, as that population ages, the need for additional intensive services that we see in the house population.
Anyone who's dealt with an aging member of their family knows how difficult it is to find good health care in long-term places for people to live and get the services they need.
And that is only increased when you're dealing with a homeless population.
So this nurse and this thing is really to address.
We know that when a trained medical professional is present in a shelter system, they can help those frontline people who are already, you know, some of the best we have and include case managers.
But having someone there, the data's pretty clear, helps relieve those needs to call 911 or fire.
They can deal with those emergencies that are coming up.
They're not intended to provide the health care for those people that need it.
So we're going to have to really, over a period of time in this city and across this country, reconfigure how we do permanent supportive housing.
And permanent supportive housing is going to have to take into consideration that as we move people experiencing homelessness into long term housing, For those that are aging and have profound disabilities, we're going to have to have a strategy to deal with that.
That isn't here today.
No city can scale to that completely.
But we know, working with our partners, that it is an increasing issue that this city and other cities have to address.
Would you expand on this?
How does this program address the frustration that your firefighters have been feeling over the years?
Well, it helps get people what they need.
Part of our challenge is we have a model that's built on responding to a person wherever they are and taking them to the emergency room.
That's our model.
It's not just our model.
It's the model around the nation for first responders.
But what we see now is we are going to have the ability to get people what they need and get them where they need.
And that's a part of the frustration, that the firefighters are seeing the people each and every day.
Some don't really need to go to the ER, but there's no other options.
We've just created multiple options right now.
Our HealthONE personnel will be able to pick up the phone and call in urgent care and say, hey, do you have an appointment?
I got someone right here.
And if the person doesn't have a ride, they can put them in the seat and take them.
If they respond to someone on the street at two o'clock in the morning that's calling 911 because they don't have a place to go, they'll be able to find a bed or a shelter and put them, well, they won't be on duty at two in the morning, but if it's two in the afternoon, and take them to a shelter.
If it's a person in crisis, they'll be able to call the person they need to get them what they need.
That's a part of the frustration.
We want to help.
That's what we do.
We're here to serve this community.
This gives our people another tool to serve the community.
Last question.
Is there going to be, being that this is the first one, is there going to be a certain area that you're going to be focusing on and then expand from that?
Absolutely.
We're going to be focusing on the downtown core.
What we know is every day, over 40 responses come out of this station right here, Fire Station 2. We also know at Station 10 on 4th and Washington, over 40 responses a day come out of that station.
On 25s on Capitol Hill, about 35 responses a day come out of just these three fire stations.
A large number of those responses are low acuity.
So we're starting the program down here in the downtown core.
get our hand rolls around us and really try to streamline it and figure out what's the best system possible.
Thank you very much everyone.