I took today off because of a meeting and put in more hours than if I had worked.

[Gary D.]

Well, today was the last bid to keep our Fire and Patrol boats in the marina.
The County Commissioners went public with it today. They laid it out just like Mr. Big Bucks origination did.

We have tried every angle we can think of. Even remodeling the boathouses to match the new marina’s decor.

They feel we are not needed and using their own words, We are an Eyesore, an irritant and a detriment to the sanctuary of their customers.

Now keeping in mind that they feel they only cater to the tourist and own the rest of us, how do you deal with that attitude? We have an exit date of Sept. 2005.

All we can do now is wait for the public to react.

Here is a sat pic. Ours is the "7" shaped pair on the bottom of the pic. The fire boats are directly up the pic where the road turns to the left. It a gray color.
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/image.aspx?t=1&s=10&x=2572&y=26401&z=11&w=1

Then the new Capt. and new Marine Sgt. call me in. I have to meet with them later to lay out the teams operation and how we have been doing things. For some reason the old Marine Sgt. isn’t doing this. I wish he was. So far this is going OK after the shaky start.

Oh well, time will tell.

And last but not least, the SS money is starting to come in so that project is kind of on track.

Gary D.

 

[RonDawg]

Now keeping in mind that they feel they only cater to the tourist and own the rest of us, how do you deal with that attitude? We have an exit date of Sept. 2005.

All we can do now is wait for the public to react.

What you folks need is a good, aggressive public relations campaign.

Has anybody done a study on how this forced move is going to impact response times? If the impact is significant, perhaps signs posted in areas where you tend to do a lot of rescues, or ones that were "just in the nick of time" saying "If we had to respond from anywhere than our current location, it will take an additional X minutes for us to get here" might be effective in galvanizing public support.

 

[Gary D.]

What you folks need is a good, aggressive public relations campaign.

Has anybody done a study on how this forced move is going to impact response times? If the impact is significant, perhaps signs posted in areas where you tend to do a lot of rescues, or ones that were "just in the nick of time" saying "If we had to respond from anywhere than our current location, it will take an additional X minutes for us to get here" might be effective in galvanizing public support.

It's in the works.

Not only will the times increase on that lake but times responding to all of the lakes will increase.

If we need a team to respond from that lake to another lake they will have to go through the boat loading process instead of just dropping the boat off in it's slip and going.

Should that team need to get another boat all of our deputies can get into the Marine Building, get a truck and get a boat hooked up and ready to go for them to just pick up and go. That happens quite often. With only 5 or 6 Marine teams and 18 lakes with 80 miles of river to patrol things can get a little wild from time to time.

At the very least, on a good day without the summer boatramp traffic jams, times will increase by 30-45 minutes just to get a small vessel on the water. Our bigger boats will take longer due to weight and being over width. On warm summer days it could be an hour or longer.

Just not good at all. We are going to be good and let the politicial Big Horns buck heads. The fewer of us that "T" them off the better.

Gary D.