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Pursuant to Charter Sections 2.103 and 3.100(7), and Administrative Code Section 2.11, the Mayor shall answer the following eligible question submitted from the Supervisor representing District 5. The Mayor may address the Board initially for up to five minutes. Discussion shall not exceed five minutes per Supervisor.
1. As we have all now seen in the news, and some San Franciscans have unfortunately experienced personally, we have a crisis in our Fire Department’s ambulance system.
The Department is out of compliance with the service level it is obligated to provide under its “Exclusive Operating Area” with the state. It is also failing to meet its own standards for ambulance response times. The City aims to have ambulances on the scene of emergencies within 10 minutes 90% of the time. In July and August the Fire Department’s actual response was almost 50% longer than that. There were 374 occasions when it took more than 20 minutes for an ambulance to arrive-in August alone. “Medic-to-follow” calls, when the Fire Department literally does not have an ambulance available to send to someone in need, have increased over 500% since 2008, averaging eight times per day in 2013 and spiking dramatically since. Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors has approved funding for 16 new ambulances in the last several years, and the Fire Department has still not completed the purchase or put a single one into service.
I know you have convened a working group to develop short-, medium-, and long-term measures to address this crisis, and I thank you for inviting me to join that process.
But I and every employee group in the Fire Department have lost faith in the current leadership of the Department. We saw this crisis coming. I held my first hearing on it in January of 2014. Why was this allowed to get so bad, and what are you doing to hold the leadership of the Fire Department accountable? (Supervisor Breed, District 5)
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