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78 Page 5 South County Fire Authority removed the downtown San Carlos engine company (E 13) completely in late 2004. The San Carlos engine company on The Alameda (E16) is operating at the Basic Life Support level (no paramedic) most of the time. Although isolated and infrequent, they were also forced to close stations. The City of San Mateo removes the downtown engine company (E21) from service frequently in a configuration similar to Redwood City, but their model removes the company at night more frequently than in Redwood City. San Mateo anticipates returning E21 to full-time status in FY 06/07 representing a reinstatement cost of more than $700,000.00. The City of San Bruno continues to "cross-staff' (one crew staffs two units and moves back and forth) their main station engine company and truck company. In order to meet current budget constraints, if this procedure was used as the only strategy, San Bruno Fire would have to cross-staff 100 to 120 shifts per year. The cross-staffing model is still a net loss of one fire company. San Bruno will be utilizing a combination of strategies so that they are not concentrating the budget cut accommodation on the cross-staffing model. The completion of major projects in downtown Redwood City promise a far different experience than the current theater located on East Bayshore. The new theater location is not only larger, but will generate longer visitor stays in the downtown and will encompass multiple linking activities such as shopping, dinner, and a movie or entertainment at one of the other venues. The significance of this from an emergency response standpoint is that the daytime and nighttime population will be greater than what we currently experience, and this greater population in the downtown will equate to more calls for service. Staff is not familiar with a metric that can be used to correlate visitor population with calls for service because of many independent variables, be we do expect additional call volume. Analysis Redwood City Fire monitors response time performance and utilizes this information as an annual performance measure. Our response time performance target is 5 minutes. Response time deteriorated during the first year (2003) of E9 service reductions (from 5 minutes, 85% of the time, to; 5 minutes, 82% of the time). Response time performance stabilized at the 82% level in calendar years 2004 and 2005. When compared to 2003, the number of incident responses that did not meet the 5 minute response target increased by an average of 3% (164 call average during each year for 2004 and 2005) city-wide. As a reference, the 5 minute response target was missed for 1348 calls in 2005 and 1361 calls in 2004. Turnout time remained fairly constant during this same period (a range of 71 seconds to 74 seconds between 2001 and 2005) so the implication is that travel time is the factor that changed. Two variables effect travel time; road conditions (which includes traffic) and/or distance. The distance that a fire company has to travel is increased when the first-due company is not available for their own call and the next-closest company has to respond from farther away. The reduced capacity of E9 is probably one of the factors in this average increase in response times. The calls evaluated were within the jurisdiction of the Redwood City Fire Department and did not include response into other jurisdictions, but the effects of cuts in neighboring jurisdictions may have also influenced 5