BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto City Council has voted to bring back a fire engine to the station at Mitchell Park, where neighbors are afraid slow response times will lead to disaster.
“The LA fires are a reminder that every second really counts,” Councilman Greer Stone said on Monday before a 7-0 vote.
Council added a fire captain position and asked City Manager Ed Shikada to present options in May for adding three positions, to allow the station to have both an engine and an ambulance at the corner of East Meadow Drive and Middlefield Road.
In the meantime, the single position will allow a crew of three firefighters to take out an engine or ambulance, but not at the same time.
The single position will be filled with overtime by existing firefighters, and not a new hire, Shikada said.
The station is getting rebuilt and will open in early 2027, and the goal is to have both an engine and an ambulance by then, Chief Geo Blackshire said.
Firefighters said manning an ambulance and fire engine at the same time isn’t ideal. They want the city to add full-time positions and not mandate overtime.
“We are not even talking about adding exotic resources,” said Joe Penko, president of the firefighter’s union. “The inaction that we’re taking on a regular basis is incredible to me. Do the right thing.”
The city has six full-time fire stations, with a total of five engines, one ladder truck and three roving ambulances, Blackshire said.
Fire Station 4 has been without an engine since July 2020 due to pandemic-era budget cuts.
More and more residents have learned about the absence in recent weeks, and a petition to bring back the engine gathered 542 signatures.
Around 100 residents attended a community meeting at the Mitchell Park Community Center on Feb. 13.
Blackshire reassured residents that his department is taking a systemic, data-driven approach, but the loudest applause of the night was for a retired firefighter who implored the city to put an engine at every station.
Engines are usually the first to respond to any kind of call, and ambulances are taken out of service if they’re transporting a patient to the hospital, Blackshire said.
An ambulance at Fire Station 4 is used 20% of the time, which means a fire engine would be available around 80% of the time, Blackshire said.
Council can make more changes during budget discussions in May and June. But Shikada warned that the city is projecting a deficit.
My Name is Chris Jackson,
I am a 35-year resident of south Palo Alto, and I’m also a retired fire captain with the City of Palo Alto.
Currently there is no Fire Engine at station 4!
The City of Palo Alto came to a decision without notifying its residents that they were going to remove the Fire Engine from Mitchel Park station 4 in 2022. After losing the business complex with Philz Coffee, Bills Café, and the AJ cleaners to fire in 2022, residents noticed that the responding fire engine came from Barron Park station 5, and the response was delayed with a response time of 8.5 min. The same engine responded to a Eichler fire near station 4 on Janice Way within a response time of 8.5 min. As a past fire captain at station 4, when we had a fire engine, the response time would have been less than 4 minutes. Station 4 is 0.6 miles or 2 minutes from Philz coffee. Barron Park Fire station is 2.3 miles or 8.5 minutes from Philz coffee.
Each year the residents of Palo Alto have to pay exorbitant property tax and increasing fire insurance rates. Owning a home in palo alto is a life time financial investment, and residents expect the city provide quality fire protection to protect their investment.
– The residents of south palo alto demand a fire engine to be return to Mitchell Park fire station.
– We want to end cross staffing and want a fully staffed fire crew capable of responding to all fires and medical responses.
– We also want a full transport ambulance with two paramedics staffing it.
– We also want to protect our firefighters from the abuse of the city imposing the excessive use mandatory overtime for periods exceeding 48 -to- 96-hour shifts.