In an update to the San Benito Board of Supervisors on Tuesday about the city’s June decision to partner with the county to consolidate fire department resources, Hollister Fire Chief Mike O’Connor said that “so far, everything’s going really well.”
The fire chief said the new consolidation has actually helped in allowing faster responses to calls, telling the board that “responses (response times) have dropped.”
Also, he said that most of the calls are coming from the city of Hollister and that it now takes seven minutes to respond to an average call.
The Hollister Fire Department in June took over county fire services after supervisors approved a contract with the city not to exceed $1.1 million per year. The contract with the city for fire service will run through June 2015, when it will begin automatically renewing annually unless one of the parties terminates it. The contract states that the cost may not increase by more than 3 percent based on the Consumer Price Index.
The county’s move to the city contract ended a nearly 60-year relationship with Calfire as the provider of fire services.
