Comments made by firefighters and citizens were factual, and went heard but not listened to by county commissioners. Craig Hare should be accountable for a false presentation short changing calls on page 9 and 10 of his presentation by 40,000 incidents. The places to cut money is in the huge admin staff, starting with a private ambulance service which has 65 supervisors, which about twice the amount of ambulances the have on the road on average. It is too bad people like KT, that is how he signs his commissioner emails, have their minds already made up prior to this meeting. The only person at the podium I heard ask for this to go through was Craig Hare, not one of the nineteen fire chiefs in Pinellas County was there recommending it. The worst idea I have ever heard is lower the standards by increasing the times from an average 4 1/2 minute response to 7 + minutes. I sure hope my house is not on fire when the extra 2 minutes it will take a unit to respond to my house occurs. By the way anybody curious how many house fires Craig Hare has put out? My bet is ZERO. Why is a guy with no fire experience moving fire units around?

It was very obvious that the commissioners had already made up their minds, and made the decision to go ahead with the resolutions, despite the objections from the various city officials, mayors, commissioners, even the EMS board. They did not care that the models used were confirmed to be basic at best. The commission based their whole decision on the models that they said they would review later, and not the ACTUAL raw data. The request was not to vote no to the proposals, but to delay the vote for 30 days to give the commissioners the time to review the trye ACTUAL numbers. They would not.

I watched the County Commission meeting today and the commission meeting was quite interesting listing to the Fire Service voice opinions that where quite not factual. They presented information in limted view with not much truth at times. Emotions have to be put aside and facts have to be evaluated.