The agenda for the second meeting of the
CRC included a review of the Lake Bluff proposal but we were not given the
7/8/18 “supplemental memorandum” nor the 8/20/18 “Fire and Ambulance Service
Proposal” so we didn’t accomplish that review.
Those documents were posted to the Rockland website the next day but the matter was not tabled so the moment is
passed. Likewise
I find in the back of our 3-ring notebooks five orphaned documents: a 4/6/16 email, a dialog taken from “July 18”
of unspecified year, a 7/19/16 email, a 11/29/16 email and a dialog taken from
“Jan 5” of unspecified year. I have read
those materials and am nonplussed.
The hundred (or so) pages we were given
to review individually will not all be reviewed by the group, apparently. I have reviewed it individually and my
impression at this point is that materials originating with the Malinowski
Board are inflammatory and materials originating with the Rogers Board are
benign. That pattern continues with the
audio recording.
At the first meeting of the CRC we were
given a thumb drive that contained an audio recording of a RFPD Board meeting
held January 25, 2018. We were to
discuss it at our second meeting but it was deferred
until our (presumably) final, third meeting.
We were not invited to prepare otherwise for that third meeting – the
“Service Level” and the “Disposition of Assets” sections of our 3-ring notebooks
have no contents. I don’t know how to
prepare for the final meeting of the CRC except to review the thumb drive.
Let’s be fair.
Who decides a school dress code? Or the truancy policy? Or how often lime gelatin is served in the
cafeteria?
Is it the unionized teachers? The Student Council? The loudest of the parents?
No.
It is the school board. The
school “district” is a tax district with a defined mission and a school board
accountable for that mission. The board
decides how it will serve its mission, which may involve hiring a
superintendent to carry out the board’s decisions. It may also hire a principal for each school
building.
But it is not the principals, nor the
superintendent, nor the frequently irrational parents, nor the ignorant and
immature students, nor the self-interested teacher’s union that sets
policy. It is only the duly-constituted school board.
Every tax district has a board. Some are elected; most are appointed. Of the 40 fire districts in Lake County,
Illinois 39 are appointed (not us!) but they are appointed by elected
officials. The board has the power to
tax in order to service its mission. The
logic of our democracy is that the tax district is accountable to the
taxpayers, not the beneficiaries of the mission.
The last page of the “background”
section of our 3-ring notebooks offers as an “important point” that: “These type of
mergers require our Knollwood Chief to be involved in order to be truly
Equitable”
Well.
The capitalized final word reveals a basic misunderstanding of the role
of our fire chief. It is his job to
carry-out the wishes of the board and he is subject to being fired at any time
for any reason. The fire board has no
obligation to be “equitable” to him or any other employee. The fire board’s sole concern is the
interests of the taxpayers regarding its fire & rescue mission.
Let me put this in personal terms: I am an overweight and aging taxpayer,
resident in the district. If I dial 911,
what considerations do I want the fire board to have considered as I wait for
the ambulance? The career path of
firefighters? The Chinese prison-labor
used to weave our firehoses? Global
warming, perhaps? No. Not hardly.
The author of the background section who
claims to be authoritative on what “these types of mergers” require and asserts
that the process must be “truly equitable” to anyone other than the resident
taxpayers is undemocratic, confused and ultimately cruel to Rockland heart
attack victims.
46:31 Secretary Grum: “And it almost
seems like we’re wasting some time, if … I cannot believe that Lake Bluff
doesn’t understand the predicament they’re in should we do something.”
46:42 Chief Carani: “I think they
understand it very well.”
President Rogers: “So they’re trying to work something
out with (Knollwood Fire Chief) Harlow now.
Chief Harlow and Chief Graf have got something going on. I haven’t been included in it yet but I don’t – Again, I haven’t heard it, so I won’t pass
judgement, but we’ve got two areas that both have the same problem. I don’t think combining the problems fixes
the problem…I would like to have a full-time department covering my calls.”
President Rogers says, “Chief Harlow and
Chief Graf have got something going on.
I haven’t been included in it yet.”
The only fault I find is that laissez faire posture toward the
duty of the board.
The muscle and passion of American
patriots.
rocklandfpd.com/history-founding begins,
“Founded in the 1940s by returning World War II veterans, the Rockland Fire
Protection District was organized by local men to provide fire services for
their own community. In the early months of 1947, the Rockland Fire Department
was officially recognized by the State of Illinois as a volunteer fire
department.”
It ends, “The history of the Knollwood
Volunteer Fire Department is rooted in the muscle and
passion of American patriots. Since its founding by returning WWII
veterans, department members continue to protect neighbors, friends, and family
alike while developing strong social ties.”
Well, times have changed. At the 59 minute
point of the Special Meeting of January 25, 2018:
Chief Siebert: “Because the union will not allow
it. It becomes a reclassification … how
many people are actually Knollwood residents who are actually working here.”
Secretary Grum: “It’s less than 50
percent.”
Why?
At the 58 minute point:
Secretary Grum: “A lot of people
come on here to get the training tools that will help them to get a full-time
career [elsewhere].”
The Rogers Board understood that the
purpose of the Rockland District is not to celebrate “the muscle and passion of
American patriots” nor is it to facilitate the firefighting aspirations of
(usually non-resident) volunteers. We
residents, as individuals, ought to celebrate American patriots and aspire to
noble careers ourselves, but those are not legitimate reasons to levy taxes
upon district residents.
Issel, Knesley, Grum, Harlow and others
– I don’t know these people personally but I have
heard their names for decades. I take it
as read that their service to the RFPD was honorable and generous. I thank them and wish them well.
But Rockland does not exist to serve the
volunteers any more than it exists to serve residents of surrounding
communities. (That is to say: Surrounding tax districts.) The only question that a tax district board
should ask is, “How do we serve our mission most efficiently?”
Two percent.
How much service does Rockland
require? Back in 2017 and 2018 when the
Rogers Board was contemplating an IGA, this was a fundamental question. Unfortunately, the question has been muddied
by “mutual aid.” From Wikipedia:
In emergency services,
mutual aid is an agreement among emergency responders to lend assistance across
jurisdictional boundaries. This may occur due to an emergency response that
exceeds local resources, such as a disaster or a multiple-alarm fire. Mutual
aid may be ad hoc, requested only when such an emergency occurs. It may also be
a formal standing agreement for cooperative emergency management on a
continuing basis, such as ensuring that resources are dispatched from the
nearest fire station, regardless of which side of the jurisdictional boundary
the incident is on. Agreements that send closest resources are regularly referred
to as "automatic aid agreements".
When calculating the “cost per call”
does one divide by the number of responses in-district only? Or should the denominator be larger (and the
quotient smaller) by including responses out-of-district? Should the district facility be right-sized for the taxpayers of the district or should it
be larger than what its own jurisdiction requires so that it will have more
surplus capacity for the benefit of surrounding jurisdictions?
Those are difficult questions only for
people who are confused about what a tax district really is. The Rockland District board taxes the
Rockland District residents for the benefit of those residents. Only.
And that is not to say that we must have
a fire department with trucks and buildings.
The Rockland Board can discharge its responsibility to Rockland
taxpayers by contracting for services – which is what our IGA does. The choice between self-source versus outsource
should be made rationally. Legitimate
considerations include response time and cost.
Mutual aid is not a legitimate consideration. (Remember that a majority of our volunteers did not live in the
District.) Consider the absurdity of
taxing district residents to pay people who do not live in the district to
fight fires that are not in the district.
The taxpayers of Libertyville, Lake
Forest, Lake Bluff and North Chicago can make their own decisions about
servicing their own needs and taxing themselves. They can also choose to extend their services
to Rockland District residents for a fee.
The question before the Rogers Board was never “who will put out the
fire” but rather “who will pay for putting out the fire.”
And so, returning to the “fundamental
question” of the service level that the Rockland District requires, unmuddied
by mutual aid, we now have a definitive answer.
Service for calendar 2019 was provided by Libertyville and Lake Forest –
two organizations that reliably tallied the number of calls made to the
Rockland jurisdiction.
(rocklandfpd.com/sites/default/files/reports/2019-12-response-report-LV.pdf
rocklandfpd.com/sites/default/files/reports/2019-12-response-report-LF.pdf)
Libertyville made 43 ambulance calls and
no fire calls. Lake Forest made 124
ambulance calls and 3 fire calls. Lib
and LF also responded to 58 false alarms.
|
|
|
Libertyville |
Lake
Forest |
total |
percent |
|
|
Ambulance |
43 |
124 |
167 |
98.2 |
|
|
Fire |
0 |
3 |
3 |
1.8 |
|
|
sub-total |
|
|
170 |
100.0 |
|
|
False
Alarms |
26 |
32 |
58 |
|
|
|
total |
69 |
159 |
228 |
|
98 percent of the business of Rockland is
ambulance. Only 2 percent is fire.
But Rockland has never operated its own
ambulance. We have contracted with
Libertyville and Lake Forest for ambulance services for years. The Rogers Board’s creation of our new IGA
did not change the 98 percent. So what was all the controversy?
Is this really about the 2
percent? Or was the controversy simply
an emotional reaction to issues that most people did not really
understand? Why didn’t the two volunteer
departments (Knollwood and Lake Bluff) just band together and keep their trucks
and buildings? From the Special Meeting
of January 25, 2018:
47:13 Secretary Grum: “And both still
have to rely on another department to transport.”
President Rogers: “Right.”
Secretary Grum: “To me that doesn’t
accomplish anything. Two struggling
departments together are still struggling.”
President Rogers: “And adding us to the ambulance
business, I don’t think that’s a solution.”
The Rogers Board weighed the significant
cost of the fire equipment and the firehouse (and the cost and other
complications of having people on the payroll) against the cost of expanding
our outsourcing from 98 percent to 100 percent.
Response time.
As a result of our new IGA, people will
die. That is not relevant, however. People would die otherwise as well.
In reviewing the action of the Rogers
Board, we would have great benefit from a statistic that objectively quantifies
our service before the transition year (FY19) and after the transition
year. There is only one: Response time.
Calendar year ’19 is now history and
Libertyville has reported an average response of 4 minutes and 18 seconds. (rocklandfpd.com/sites/default/files/reports/2019-12-response-report-LV.pdf) That is exactly 4.3 minutes for
“average emergent response time (2019) from alarm to arrival.”
Lake Forest was more difficult to
extract from the Rockland website but we do have four
recent monthly response times: 6:29,
6:40, 5:59 & 6:35 for August, September, November & December.
(rocklandfpd.com/sites/default/files/reports/2019-08-response-report-LF.pdf,
rocklandfpd.com/sites/default/files/reports/2019-09-response-report-LF.pdf,
rocklandfpd.com/sites/default/files/reports/2019-11-response-report-LF.pdf,
rocklandfpd.com/sites/default/files/reports/2019-12-response-report-LF.pdf)
There were 15 responses for each of the
older two months and 13 for each of the more recent two. So:
=(6.48*15+6.67*15+5.98*13+6.58*13)/(15+15+13+13)
=(97.25+100+77.78+85.58)/56=6.44=6:26.4
=less than six-and-a-half minutes for
Lake Forest
The calendar year 2019 produced 69 emergency
calls for Libertyville and 159 for Lake Forest.
And so: (4.3*69+6.44*159)/228=5.8=5:48
Rockland has recently
completed our first full calendar year under our new IGA. The response time delivered by our providers
was 5 minutes and 48 seconds.
But to what does one compare that? The National Fire Protection Association
(NFPA) has established “codes and standards” including NFPA 1720: “Standard for the
Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical
Operations, and Special Operations to the Public by Volunteer Fire Departments”
(nfpa.org/Codes-and-Standards/ARCHIVED/Safer-Act-Grant/NFPA-1720)
NFPA 1720 establishes a standard for
urban areas of nine minutes and for suburban areas of ten minutes. We are getting less than 6 minutes.
The firehouse mistake.
On Saturday February 8th, I saw that the
agenda was just posted for the 2/10 meeting.
I don’t know what happened at the January 13th meeting because the
minutes are not posted, contrary to the campaign promises of a current member
of the board. But the new agenda
includes item 9 which reads:
“Discussion/action on leasing the Rockland FD Building.” This, contrary to the Agenda item 9 for 1/13
which reads, “Discussion/possible action regarding the sale of the Rockland FD
Building and the bid/offer submitted by Gallery 200, LLC by Haig Mathew Klujian dated April 25, 2019”
Sadly it
seems that the building sale has fallen through. The Rogers Board did everything to realize
their promise to the Rockland residents except consummate the building
sale. After all, a cord-cutter does
not continue to pay Comcast. They
sold the equipment, got an appraisal, solicited bids, received multiple bidders
clamoring with multiple bids, selected one that was well above the $630 thousand
appraisal and entered into an agreement to sell the building. It should have been a layup for the
Malinowski Board.
Sorry, wrong seasonal metaphor. The SuperBowl was
last weekend: Trailing by two, the
Rogers Board drove down to the 8-yard line and, with one second remaining, the
Malinowski Board jogged onto the field…and missed the field goal.
Apparently, we blew it. The IGA projection, burdened by Building
Expense (recall that the Rogers Board understood that “Building Expense” for
the post-transition years according to the IGA projection was $682,545.70) and
deprived of the realization of our building equity is our sad reality. The Malinowski Board has been seated for less
than a year and has already cost the district taxpayers nearly a hundred thousand
dollars and is on the path to needlessly blow a hundred grand per year
routinely.
The damage may be partially mitigated by
IDOT years from now, though that is small consolation to district residents who
are paying for nothing today. The
Malinowski Board can further console itself with the fact that a previous board
(prior to the Rogers Board) made the foolish choice of saddling the district
with this white elephant of a building in the first place. (That is what the Rogers Board
addressed.) It is two-story. It has five truck bays. None are drive-through.
The surrounding five firehouses have
bays for their fire trucks. Indeed, that
is their main purpose. Only Lake Forest
Number One has five truck-bays, but it serves the 8 square miles of Lake Forest
east of Highway 41. We also have five but we serve only 1 square mile. Lake Forest Number Two serves the 8 square
miles of Lake Forest west of Highway 41 with 3 truck-bays. Libertyville 3 has 3, North Chicago 2 has 2
and Lake Bluff has 3.
The five surrounding firehouses have a
total of 16 truck-bays and every one is the
drive-through type where the firetruck drives forward into the bay and then the
door closes behind the truck. When the
truck leaves, a second door in front of the truck opens so the truck can
continue forward to exit the bay. Only
Knollwood has the dangerous type of truck bay that requires the truck to back
into it, risking damage to both truck and building. And we have five of them.
Plus, we have an upstairs. The two-story building requires an elevator
(per ADA) which is horribly expensive.
The expense is squandered since the upstairs is not necessary and not
used. In addition to the superfluous
back-in type truck-bays, the first floor also provides a dispatch room, a
weight room, a kitchen, the restrooms and the class/meeting/voter room. We spent a quarter-million dollars for an
elevator to nowhere.
It is a special purpose building that is
ill-suited for its special purpose.
The rug merchant who had the winning bid
intended to use it as a warehouse and the high truck-bays allowed the washing
and drying of rugs. Credit goes to him
for finding value that he could realize.
But the Malinowski Board did not close the deal and instead we continue
make mortgage payments of $8 thousand per month for nothing. And, apparently, now we will continue to pay
$8 thousand per month, perhaps until the IDOT authorities seize it through
eminent domain.
The Malinowski Board is more fortunate
than it deserves that there is a safety net under the safety net: Even though the sale fell through, Illinois
will purchase the building for Fair Market Value. But FMV too has been compromised by the
Malinowski Board.
If the Board had sold the building for
$980 thousand to the rug merchant, two things would have been established: (1) We get $980 thousand, which extinguishes
the mortgage and puts a few bucks in our pocket, and (2) an exchange
transaction establishes the FMV to be $980 thousand.
That means that we get $980 thousand for
sure and the rug merchant gets a $980 thousand FMV presumption when Illinois
condemns. The rug merchant assumes the
capital risk for some period of years while he harvests value from the building
but has a valid argument that the building is in fact a million-dollar
building.
But we did not so establish that
value. Instead, Illinois will say, “So
you tried to sell it for $980 thousand but didn’t. The FMV is therefore something less.” The Malinowski Board has made $980 thousand
the ceiling value of the building, and we will have to settle for something
less. And we must pay $8 thousand per
month until we do.
Albatross under glass.
From the Special Meeting of January 25,
2018 at 38:58 President Rogers inquired of the two chiefs regarding the
Knollwood building use. Chief Siebert
said that “it makes no sense” since Libertyville 3 and North Chicago 2 are both
located less than two miles to the north of Knollwood and his two Lake Forest
stations are south, that another firehouse in between those four 24-hour
firehouses is a redundancy and “if we keep this as a fire station, we just
perpetuate the problem.”
He was right.
Barrington envies Knollwood.
At 6 o’clock in the morning on January 24,
2020 a train blocked a strategic crossing in Grayslake Illinois, due to a
mechanical failure, until one o’clock in the afternoon that day. Seven hours.
Do you know how much damage can occur if a structure fire burns for
seven hours before mitigation is attempted?
Or how much the chance of survival diminishes for a heart attack victim
if the ambulance is delayed by seven hours?
dailyherald.com/news/20200123/a-freight-train-blocked-traffic-for-7-hours-grayslake-leaders-call-it-a-significant-problem
The Canadian National railroad (CN)
bought the J (the EJ&E railroad, the road that crosses Waukegan Road in
Knollwood) so they could run their long freight trains around Chicago instead
of through Chicago. Fortunately for us,
the trains from the north intercept the J in Roundout,
just west of us. In Barrington,
ambulances are delayed by CN freight trains.
Too bad for them.
The Roger Board negotiated an IGA that
assigns primary responsibility for service south of our tracks to Lake Forest
which can service areas south of our tracks without crossing any tracks. It also assigns primary responsibility for
service north of our tracks to Libertyville which can service areas north of
our tracks without crossing any tracks.
This is brilliant.
14:42 Chief Carani: “380 [thousand
dollars per year] goes to 460 for additional people…and that’s just for our
department. With the two (LF also) of us
coming in, we decided to ... (17:50) we are providing a unique coverage system
that is going to provide the Rockland resident with what I perceive as an
excellent level of coverage.”
32:54 Chief Carani: “So for those types
of calls, for sure, car accidents, it is going to be a joint response. One’s going to send the ambulance, one’s
going to send the engine depending on where the accident is, and, full rest,
typically it gets dispatched with an engine.
So if Lake Forest is going to come with an
ambulance, we would most likely send a Station 3 engine. If we’re going with an ambulance, we’d send a
Lake Forest engine.”
Our two providers address 911 calls in a
most purposeful way with primary responsibility for every address within the
Rockland District assigned to responders who will not have to cross railroad
tracks to get to the victims. Those rich
suckers, anxious on their Barrington estates, must admire the wisdom of the
Rogers Board.