Master Plan, CRA/SOC
Town of Southington, CT
The members who responded to the survey saw opportunities for improvement in the areas of communication, accountability, training, staffing, and the coordination between career and volunteer firefighters. Additionally, calls for keeping town politics out of the fire service in Southington were many and repeated. ESCI factored this input as well as the rest of that which was submitted in the survey when designing recommendations for the Recommendations and Strategies Section of this report. The Internal Survey has been included in this report as Appendix A: Southington Fire Department Internal Survey.
External Stakeholder Input Due to Covid-19 Restrictions, instead of holding community forums, ESCI team members conducted an electronic survey for the residents and business owners within the Town of Southington to determine internal, external, and policy-maker expectations of the Southington Fire Department. To solicit input from the Southington Community, ESCI created a nine-question online survey. The resident and business surveys were both open for participation from March 15, 2021 through April 15, 2021. The Southington Fire Department posted the link to this survey on the department website and shared information about the survey through its other normal communication channels. A total of 220 residents participated in the online surveys. The people who participated in the Southington Fire Department Community Feedback Surveys were, in general, very pleased with the services offered by the fire department. This is a credit to the men and women of the Southington Fire Department who provide a consistently high levels of service to the community every day. When asked to rank the following priorities, Resource Deployment – arriving in less than five minutes was the community’s highest priority. Cost containment was the lowest priority. The following table illustrates the weighted average of the survey responses on a scale of 1 to 6 with 6 being the highest priority.
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