Hays County Fire Marshal Steve Seddig gave an annual update on his office at the regularly-scheduled Hays County Commissioners Court meeting Tuesday.
“Our population, as everybody knows, is around 300,000 right now, or 680 square miles. The staffing shortages limit our annual business inspections ability, unpermitted development enforcement and the Firewise program, which is a mitigation program,” Seddig said. “We do have a backlog right now because of our inability to do annual inspections.”
Seddig pointed to the amount of hours spent on investigations, inspections and permitting and showed that more staff were needed to chip away at the backlog. He said the additional staffing would increase the ability to maintain services, particularly if someone were to fall ill.
“An Inspector/Plan Reviewer is what our goal is. … We are a fire and a law enforcement agency, so we have both of those responsibilities and functions, but this person would just be for that. And then some administrative support, which would help us with velocity — answering the phone, as far as getting permits in, helping our customers get off the ground with their projects,” Seddig said. “The solution we have right now, we discussed in May, was these two … [Full Time Equivalents] with that admin staff to enhance safety and compliance and efficiency.”
Hays County Commissioner Morgan Hammer said that she’s been meeting with “constituents left and right that say that they’re having increased delays in the permitting process.” She explained her reasoning for bringing the item to court.
“They are overworked. They’re working a lot of hours. Their comp time is astro- nomical. The amount of hours that they worked on this fire for Wimberly was a lot,” Hammer said. “[I just wanted to give] him the ability to educate all the commissioners and you, Judge Becerra, on what they’re currently dealing with.”
Hays County Commissioner Walt Smith wanted Seddig to look at maximizing the use of his current workforce.
“I know you have to prioritize your employee time to the ‘nth’ degree because of all the demands you have in your office. I would continue and ask and encourage you to look at how we could go about improving efficiencies in that system, along with the additional personnel — I think you got one in this year’s budget — and how we can better improve the efficiency with what we have,” Smith said, recommending a third-party contractor for planning and review but not final inspection. “It gives you more time if we look at some efficiencies in that and the programmatic things that you’re doing right now, specifically on initial plan review on initial inspection. I still think that we need a final walk through and final inspection, and … someone from the county needs to do that to ensure that it’s done correctly. But I also think that there are some things that we can do and look at to maybe improve some efficiencies in there that can help you with those overburdens.”
Seddig said thirdparty contractors are already something the office is using.
“We are using a third-party for sites and projects over 10,000 square feet, so that is part of our process right now for the building and fire sprinkler, fire alarm systems. So that is one of our tools. And for good reason too; we’re not fire protection engineers, and we’re not architects; so we get those third party reviews,” Seddig said. “Then we just make sure that whatever’s coming out of the ground out there is actually what they turned in for the plans. That’s kind of our role as a middleman.”
Vickie Dorsett, Hays County budget officer, said there were two full-time positions in the office that had vacancies for close to three months but said there are additional funds they could utilize for some staffing issues.
“I know that’s probably been difficult and affected their ability to move things forward,” she said. “They also have a pool of five current employees that are in the fire investigator pool of funds that they can actually utilize as well as some special operations positions that assist in the hazmat areas.”
Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra said he appreciated the presentation as “we move through this budget process to consider all the staffing.”
“We’ll talk more during the budget,” Becerra said.”
