Fire calls make history

The year 2019 was a busy one for the Cloquet Area Fire District and 2020 is unlikely to get any slower.

Crews surpassed the now 10-year-old district’s historic high run total of 2,985 incidents in 2016 on Dec. 9 … with almost three weeks left to go in the year.

“We’re not getting slower, but we are getting busier,” said CAFD Chief Kevin Schroeder, explaining that about 85.5 percent of its calls are ambulance, while 17.5 are fire calls.

Schroeder said the pace is so great that the fire district is planning to change its structure by dividing into a west and east side, following the St. Louis River, and eventually to add a northern component to help with coverage and response time to calls.

“There’s going to be an East side and a West side, no longer Scanlon, Cloquet, Perch Lake,” he said. “It’s gonna be an east side of the river and a west side of the river. For the first time in 10 years, we’ll actually be operating as a true district.”

Comprised of member communities of Cloquet, Scanlon, Perch Lake and Brevator, CAFD also provides structural fire protection under contract to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The total area covered spans 170 square miles.

CAFD also provides ambulance service to a state-mandated area of more than 250 square miles in Carlton County and southern St. Louis County.

The first move in the reorganization of the district this year will be to hire a new firefighter/EMT (emergency medical technician) for each of the district’s three shifts.

Secondly, rather than having all of its full-time staff operate out of Station 1 in Cloquet (the east side), the fire district will begin staffing Station 2 in Perch Lake (the west side) with four people from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day.

The fire chief explained that call volumes in that area are highest during the daytime hours, plus at night most of the district’s 34 paid-on-call (POC) staff are home from their full-time jobs and available to respond to calls, he said. And rather than moving four full-time staff members from Cloquet to Perch Lake every day, the plan is to move two people over plus schedule two POC staff.

“We’re hoping to have two paramedics and two firefighter/EMTs there,” the chief said, explaining that it should be easier to hire a firefighter/EMT because the educational requirements are less for the basic life support(180 hour course) than for a paramedic’s advanced life support training (two year degree).

Hiring is a big issue for the CAFD and fire departments across the country, Schroeder said in an interview last week.

He pointed out that some calls don’t require paramedic level care which is part of the reason they’re going to hire EMTs. The other reason is they’ve had firefighter/paramedic spots open for over a year with no applicants.

“It’s an efficiency issue. An example is we’re taking mental health transfers from Cloquet hospital to places like Fargo or I don’t need two paramedic-level providers on that call,” he said, pointing out that the district will save money and leave its most highly qualified staff in town for 911 calls that might require their skills.

Although a new building is not part of the plan for 2020, it’s still on the table.

Schroeder said long-term goals still include combining Station 1 in Cloquet and Station 3 in Scanlon into one new facility that will better meet the space and training needs of the fire district, but that is further into the future, Schroeder said. Other plans including merging the Brevator and Perch Lake stations into one, and eventually create a north station in East Brevator.

“We are just beginning the process of revisiting that whole project,” he said, regarding previous plans to build a new $10-$12 million building. “With the change in delivery model and the addition of Brevator Township, we need to go back and find out ‘does the plan we had still work for us?’”

He pointed to his office in what used to be the police department side of the public safety building at 508 Cloquet Ave.

“Although we gained some office space, this does not solve our facility issues,” he said,.

He explained that the station was built for a time when the fire department was running four-person crews versus the eight- or nine-person crews of today. It is overcrowded and there is no room to expand because of the hill and homes behind it and Cloquet Avenue in front.

“We’ve been able to reduce redundancy in equipment, things we don’t have to buy again, over the 10 years the district’s been in existence, but we just starting to reduce the inefficiency in facilities.

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Fire district taxes go up 9.1 percent

Following a public hearing on Dec. 12, board members of the Cloquet Area Fire District adopted a 2020 budget of $5,432,400. Some 55 percent of the fire district revenue is funded by local property taxes, which means the CAFD 2020 tax levy will be $2,851,892, an increase of 9.1 percent from 2019. The other 45 percent is funding through user fees and other intergovernmental revenue. CAFD Chief Kevin Schroeder said the increase will fund the replacement of two ambulances for almost $700,000 (due to age and maintenance issues), and to pay for staffing Station 2 in Perch Lake.