Yesterday's story about fire response times missed an opportunity to connect with a more general analysis of proximity, travel time, and land use, and to connect then with Our Salem.
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| Front page, Sunday |
You might recall this from a few years back.
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| Emergency response times in Salem (Kailuweit for Council, 2016) |
Though the paper shows no map, it is very likely that Sunday's article discusses a pattern nearly identical. (See previous discussion here.)
The problem of fire response time gets framed up as some neutral consequence of city growth, but it in fact is an artifact of our policy preference for growth on the edges of the city in new greenfield development with single detached housing set on large lots at autoist spacing.
We could, instead, prefer to build in areas already supplied with adequate services, and where the costs to offer a further increment of service, as well as to maintain existing service, are not so great. You will recognize a version of the Strong Towns argument here.
And if most of the calls are medical rather than actual fire, it may be that we need to redeploy resources for more ambulance service and social service, and to refocus the fire department more narrowly on fire response. As with Police, there may be a misallocation problem rather than a straight need to hire up under existing staffing and service patterns.
[Chief] Niblock said the Fire Department is getting too many calls to meet its goal.
“We need additional station locations and firefighters to be able to staff those engines to be able to provide the service,” he said....
The population boom has been the main driver of the increase. But other contributors include an aging population; an increase in drug, alcohol and mental health calls; and uninsured residents using 911 to access healthcare, Niblock said.
Ultimately, if location and proximity are so important in the delivery of services, then that is also an argument for things like the branch libraries proposed by library advocates, more neighborhood hubs and small commercial districts, and residences clustered in ways that make transit more efficient on existing routes and in numbers that make new routes possible.
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| Huge slices of the pie - via FB |
In the end, as has been pointed out on FB, Fire and Police consume a huge proportion of municipal resources, and we should review that more closely rather than accept uncritically claims we need a whole lot more of the same.
1 comment:
I don't think there is a legally viable route to prevent development of undeveloped areas that are within Salem's UGB. But we can pursue, as you suggest, the reallocation of resources within police and fire, and look at ways to ensure we decentralize and distribute emergency resources throughout the City.
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