The Golden Gate Fire Protection District Board approved a fuel agreement with Jefferson County during a regular meeting on November 16, 2023, at Station 82, 7181 Crawford Gulch Road, Golden. The District can now purchase fuel through Jefferson County.

Jefferson County is willing to provide the District with access to fuel, which will save the District $0.50 to $1 per gallon. Officers would like all vehicles to fuel up at the County shops. The Board approved.

The updated Fee Schedule has not yet been posted to the public. It will be online and proposed at the next meeting, on December 7.

The Board considered a suggestion that a Costco account and credit card would be helpful, as it proved to be in Nederland. The suggestion will be on the next agenda as an action item.

The District has run out of propane, so they are looking to electric heating and using solar. After the power went out for eight hours, they performed a great deal of research. The District has a heat pump system, which gives them the resilience of never losing power in a fire station.

They can get a tax credit up to 40 percent, and will discuss it at the next meeting. Making the change is not cheap, but they will look into it and run a financial analysis. They can change one station at a time for the next three years.

Now the District would like to find a volunteer to help with research, grant funding, and writing. There are many grants out there and available. Right now they have three grant opportunities they are pursuing.

Regarding material removal at Station 83 behind Station 3: rock was removed and then brought back. Board member Steve Green said he will not do any free work for the District and posted a statement on the website.

Fire Chief Kyle Kociemba-Benson reported that Prop HH failed to pass at the November 7 election. However, the Legislature met on November 17 to discuss emergency legislation regarding residential assessments. The District will not know the effect this will have on their budget.

All CSD pool insurance coverages have been updated and all the updated values have been placed into the data pool for the Impact Fee Study.

Digital information manager Becca Causey continues to make great progress with the website. SIPA has made some updates to the platform that have delayed the unveiling and implementation of the website until December. The District’s CWPP planning units have been updated in preparation for the 2024 CWPP update.

Kociemba-Benson has begun working with our assigned implementation specialist from ESO in preparation for our transition in January from Emergency Reporting to ESO. The District’s “Firewise” application was submitted for 2024.

The District sends out a big “Thank You” to Lori Brill, Teri Costeldia , and all of the community members who contributed data for the recertification. Staff has been made aware of an intermittent issue of Apple Maps showing Golden Gate Canyon as closed to traffic. This issue seems to be happening for several hours every week with regular occurrences every Tuesday. The District has been working to resolve this issue with the map provider for Apple Maps, as the issue is isolated to that platform.

This last month continued to be busy, with 95 calls to date. The trend of high acuity medical calls continued through the month, along with two significant weather events. One significant call of note was a fully-involved exotic car fire on Crawford Gulch. GGFPD Firefighters were on scene quickly and were able to extinguish the fire and prevent it from spreading to the wildland.

Paramedic coverage difficulties continue with Stadium Medical. Operations staff continue to monitor and track resource availability.

The District did experience one issue with a mis-staffed call in the last month, which was addressed directly with Stadium Medical leadership. Due to the difficulties being experienced with paramedic coverage, the Golden area chiefs met with Stadium leadership at the end of October and discussed decreasing the staffing time for Medic 23.

Medic 23 out of Fairmount FD will slowly move to a 12-hour per day staffing model. This change is within Stadium’s contract for service, and at this time this should not significantly affect service received by the citizens of GGFPD.

21 operational members and five support services members are currently on the District roster. Two applicants for Firefighter have been received and two additional applications should be received by the end of the month. The Department hopes to move them expeditiously through onboarding to get them enrolled in the FFI academy.

The joint Golden Area FFII Academy, led by GGFPD, has been a great success. The Academy met for one final session on November 18 and will be testing for their certifications on December 2.

The GGFPD FFI Academy is starting to accelerate. Academy attendees began their in-house training on November 15, with their first official Academy Day to be on December 16. GGFPD Academy attendees will be utilizing GGFPD stations, the Golden Gate Grange, and Clear Creek FDs.

The Impact Fee study lead, Jan Snyder, continues to make great headway towards the completion of the final document. At this time, all of the required data has been gathered to complete the study. A draft report should be completed by December 1, at which time it will be reviewed by BBC consulting. The Impact Fee study is currently on track to be completed by January 1, 2024.

The next Regular Board Meeting will be on December 7, 2023, at 7 p.m. at the Grange, 25231 Golden Gate Canyon Road. For more information, go to https//goldengatefire.org.