COLUMBUS, Ohio — In Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther's 2024 budget announcement, he proposed new classes of both police officers and firefighters to boost public safety.
Even with those additional firefighter hires, is it enough to protect the city and to help keep families safe?
When there's an emergency and minutes matter, most residents don't care what color truck arrives at their door to help.
“Nobody's thinking about a fire and EMS emergency until it happens to them. Candidly, that's why we are here to make sure those types of things are being taken care of and delivered upon consistently,” said Columbus Fire Union Local 67 President Steve Stein.
Does Columbus have enough firefighters and stations to show up to your emergency?
According to the Matrix report, a study the city paid to research the needs of the division in 2022, it stated medic units were "utilized so heavily they likely cannot meet the 90% travel time in performance objective. There is an immediate need for 5 additional medic units in various areas of the city."
“Not only is the hiring critically important, but our capital infrastructure. That means fire stations and trucks is going to be part and parcel with that,” Stein argued.
The Matrix report also stated as a low priority to add four more fire stations across the city to increase response times.
“We have become grossly over-reliant on this notion of automatic response,” Stein said.
What happens when Columbus fire and rescue resources are busy? Mutual aid from other departments is called if it is closer and can respond faster.
“The theory of mutual aid, yes is a balanced responsibility. If we have a major event downtown or something during an OSU game where we have several hundred thousand extra people in the city, mutual aid is designed to help offset those demands,” Stein said.
All departments in the area rely on mutual aid in case of a big fire or emergency.
But does that mutual aid help even out?
We took a look at the number of times other townships and districts took mutual aid calls into the city of Columbus and received help from Columbus.
Of the 47,779 total dispatches for Columbus Division of Fire for the year of 2023, they received exclusive or partial mutual aid in 35,899 of those calls.
In Franklin and Madison Townships, they took more mutual aid runs into the city of Columbus than they went on in their own township in 2023.
Franklin Township
- 5,262 runs in the township
- 8,723 runs into Columbus
- 1,437 received mutual aid from Columbus Fire
Madison Township
- 4,425 runs in the township
- 5,805 runs into Columbus
- 861 received mutual aid from Columbus
Mifflin Township
- 8,000 in the township
- 3,045 runs into Columbus
- 945 received aid from Columbus
Grandview Heights Fire Department
- 668 runs in Grandview Heights and Marble Cliff
- 1,574 runs in the city of Columbus
- 328 received mutual aid from Columbus
“That's not the notion of mutual aid. That is we are propagating our city services on our suburban partners. It's not fair to our residents, nor is it fair to the suburbs,” Stein argues.
10TV spoke with several suburban fire chiefs who declined to go on camera but say the numbers don't tell the whole story, that they rely on equipment and tools Columbus Fire has like its Hazmat and bomb squad teams.
Ginther declined several requests for an on-camera interview for this story, but in a statement he said, "Public Safety remains a top priority which is reflected in the 2024 Operating Budget. Personnel for police and fire is the vast majority of the spending in Public Safety. We have budgeted for total of three new Fire classes, adding 150 firefighters, bringing the total number of proposed firefighters for this year to 1,788 – more than any other time in the city's history."
Stein says he gives credit to the city for adding staffing, but argues the city is still too reliant on other township's taxpayers to handle public safety in the city.
“We are not talking where you have days or weeks to wait, we are talking minutes or seconds and that matters. It's vitally important we have resources located that can manage the demand by the growth of our region,” Stein said.