Study: CT Town Should Have Two Fire Stations, Not Three

MANSFIELD, CT—Early results from an efficiency study of Mansfield’s fire and EMS services reveal it may be better for the fire department to operate out of two stations instead of three.

The results of the study were presented by Mansfield Fire Department Chief Fran Raiola and consultant Steven Knight of Fitch & Associates during the town council meeting last week.

After it is finished, the study will cost the town about $35,000.

Knight said the full report would be presented to Carrington and Raiola within the next few weeks to get their final input.

Final recommendations would then be brought to the town council.

“I hope this comes before Chief Raiola leaves, because we need his experience with these kind of recommendations,” Mansfield Mayor Antonia Moran noted of Raiola, who is retiring in January.

Raiola said town leaders will discuss what they want the response time to be and the minimum number of fire stations needed.

He said while the distance between the three fire stations is good, the fire department hasn’t been “able to staff them properly.”

If the town decided to only have two stations, options include keeping station 307, closing station 207 and relocating station 107.

Raiola said possibilities being considered include moving station 107 south to the area of Annie E. Vinton Elementary School or moving station 107 to the north, toward the intersection of routes 44 and 32.

After the new elementary school opens, the current Vinton school will be demolished, leaving the possibility of moving the fire station.

Interim Town Manager John Carrington said station 107, which is at 879 Stafford Road ( Route 32), was identified in a facilities study conducted years ago as being in need of replacement.

“The vehicles are getting bigger, and it’s just an older facility,” he said.

Raiola noted the town doesn’t own the parking lot on the station 107 property and the fire trucks there are too close to the road.

“They’re almost in the middle of Route 32,” he said.

Knight said the study shows that with a two-station model, 93.6 percent of the calls could be responded to within eight minutes or less of travel time.

He said a new location for station 107 would eliminate the need for a station 207.

Knight said in 2019, there were 2,332 “unique incidents,” with about 6.4 calls per day.

He said about 21.7 percent of Mansfield Fire Department calls are related to a fire, while 66.6 percent are EMS calls.

“In many communities, the EMS portion will increase to upwards of 80 percent in the future, so what it really shows is like most integrated fire departments in the country, it has become much more EMS-centric than it is fire suppression-driven,” Knight said.

He said the fire department will still need to be able to perform both functions and have the appropriate resources to do so, but as time goes on, there is an “opportunity to focus more targeted resource allocation and investments toward EMS specifically.”

Knight used the 90th percentile when measuring performance, looking at the time between when a call comes in and crews leave to respond.

“As a system, you’re at just over 30 percent of the time that when you go out on a call, you have a second call later,” he said. “There’s a little bit of variability over the days of the week.”

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