Brent Batten, Naples Daily News (Florida)

Just when you thought the whole city-county-fire-EMS-sheriff-consolidation thing couldn’t get any more convoluted come this twist.

Naples City Council member Doug Finlay believes the city could save as much as $1 million a year simply by getting its lines of communication straightened out with the Collier County sheriff’s 911 dispatch center.

“To an average taxpayer, it must sound pretty ridiculous that there is no seamless dispatch of Naples Fire Department and (Collier County) EMS personnel, even though they are housed at the same two city stations, but things like that happen when two governments entities are involved,” Finlay wrote in memo to City Manager Bill Moss and other top safety officials in the city.

Moss and Naples Fire Chief Steve McInerny both think Finlay’s savings estimate is overly optimistic but efforts are being made by the Sheriff’s Office to correct the system that bounces some 911 calls made in the city to different dispatch centers.

Finlay’s premise is this: The ISO, once called the Insurance Services Organization, rates fire departments for insurance purposes. The better the rating, the lower premiums residents in an area will pay. In November, Naples will undergo an ISO review, its first in more than 20 years.

McInerny believes the city needs to hire about 12 new firefighters to maintain its ISO rating and keep residents’ insurance premiums from increasing.

Finlay argues that many Collier County EMS medics are cross-trained as firefighters. They are stationed in the same buildings as Naples’ firefighters.

But since they’re dispatched by the county’s 911 operators, as opposed to city police and fire crews, which are dispatched by the city’s own 911 operators, ISO doesn’t recognize them.

Devising a system that would let city 911 operators send the EMS ambulances to a scene along with city fire trucks would allow ISO to count the county’s cross trained paramedics as firefighters, thus avoiding the need to hire new city firefighters. The savings could be $1 million annually, Finlay reasons.

“I trust our sheriff, police chief and fire chief can find a way to develop seamless agency communication because to have EMS and fire personnel at the same station and use the excuse of poor communication to add more firefighters for ISO, makes no sense,” Finlay said.

But Moss and McInerny say it isn’t that simple. For ISO to give the city credit for the county medics, the medics would not only have to be on a common communications system with the city emergency responders, they’d have to be under common command and be trained to the same level as the city’s crews.

“It’s just not the communications,” McInerny said.

In an exchange of emails with Moss and McInerny, ISO field representative Mike Morash said Marco Island, for example, doesn’t get credit for more firefighters when cross-trained medics are stationed there.

The discussion takes place as the movement to have the Sheriff’s Office take independent fire districts and EMS under its control gathers momentum. Over the weekend, Mike Reagen, president of the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce, sent a letter to county commissioners supporting the concept of a straw poll in August to gauge voter interest in the idea.

Commissioners could vote today to place the straw poll before voters.

Finlay hopes the bigger discussion of fire district consolidation won’t overshadow this one. “Instead of jumping so far ahead, perhaps we should solve a smaller but equally important issue – communications,” he said.

Moss said the communications issue is important, even though he doesn’t believe fixing it will lead to a break from the ISO. “Ideally … we’d have common communications so we’re not all going to a call because we don’t know what the other side is doing,” Moss said.

Finlay concedes, it will be up to the ISO to determine if the effort is enough to spare City Council the difficult choice of either hiring more firefighters in tight fiscal times or allowing residents’ fire insurance premiums to go up. “If God says it isn’t, then it isn’t. And ISO is God,” he said.

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