It was Oneonta Fire Chief Brian Knapp’s turn to go before the city’s Budget Review Committee Tuesday, May 27. Members asked about the fire department’s proposed budget, looking for savings as per the committee’s charge, but what Knapp presented were spending needs and investment requests.
The committee was created to address a $1.68 million deficit in the city budget and explore potential cost savings and revenue generation. The committee began meeting monthly in January after a contentious vote on the 2025 budget, and has been hearing from department heads about their services, staffing levels, costs and areas for improvement.
On Tuesday, Knapp discussed the fire department’s staffing and equipment needs, as well as overtime costs.
The department’s services include answering calls, 75% for EMS-related incidents, with three personnel per ambulance, and 25% fire response, he said.
“It’s been my stance consistently that if we stick with the three personnel on the ambulance, we’re providing better patient care, and we’re more efficient in getting the patient to the hospital, treating them, and getting them back in service,” he said.
Knapp highlighted staffing issues.
“If there’s a car accident, we have to respond with our rescue engine and our ambulance,” he said. “That takes six staff, so that automatically generates overtime … We have seven-person crews, and when it comes to responding to a fire, we do not meet, or even come close to meeting, the requirements for the number of staff that we should have on-scene.”
Incidents like the Oneonta Theater fire in September, during which one person died, underscored the need for better staffing, he said, calling the incident an “accidental success … where we’ve had lack of manpower and we’ve had a successful outcome, where one of us could get injured or, seriously, killed.”
The department also faces challenges with aging equipment and deferred maintenance, he said.
“When it comes to going to emergencies and not having personnel, it’s also not having the proper equipment or equipment in service,” Knapp said. “We had a laundry list of things fail on our older apparatus. And we were just trying to tread water to keep up with everything that was going wrong. So we’ve had to send our major apparatus to Albany and to Syracuse for repairs, and they’ve gone through things, but with old apparatus, more things pop up. So that’s been a frustration.”
He said the department has outgrown the station’s design.
“We significantly outgrown our space,” he said. “The space is not gender-friendly. We’ve had to make modifications for our first female firefighter, and our men’s locker room is literally in the upstairs hallway, so it’s just it’s not acceptable.”
Knapp also asked the committee to consider creating an advisory fire department commission for better oversight and funding, adding that there used to be one.
Knapp created “heat maps” of call volume by day and hour from 2022 to 2024, showing the overlapping incidents. The majority of the department’s call volume is Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
A proposed plan includes increasing staff by one administrator, which would be a second assistant chief, and two firefighters with proposed rotating schedules to extend coverage and supervision during the busiest time periods.
Elayne Mosher Campoli, D-First Ward, said it’s important to consider investments that could result in savings at a later time.
“I think one of the things that I’ve really learned from this committee, especially, is that importance of us having the courage to make investments, where that is eventually what’s going to realize savings,” she said. “Just making cuts or pushing things down the road actually increases our costs over time. Trying to find these strategies that are not just saving about today, but are investing in realizing further savings down the road.”
The meeting was ongoing as of press time.
The Budget Review Committee is scheduled to hear from the Department of Public Works in June and Oneonta Public Transit in July.