Dear Fire Board, I am disappointed that you neglected to treat this Cry for Help with the urgency that it deserved. You have now joined the Menlo Park City Council and the East Palo Alto City Council in turning your backs on a vital citizen volunteer effort that could have become crucial in the months ahead. Business as usual, or in this case even slower than usual, is not the way to win the war against a fast moving and deadly virus. Time is not on our side and decisions deferred means lives lost. Unless the City Councils and the Fire Board quickly and enthusiastically endorse and financially support this volunteer effort it will die of neglect. Individuals who have been painfully recruited but who are not then trained and fully utilized will drift away. And you will continue to have no idea what is actually happening in your neighborhoods - I haven’t seen an MP police car in over a month. Fortunately, my Park Forest Plus neighborhood is fully organized with an Area Preparedness Coordinator, three Neighborhood Preparedness Coordinators and 8 Block Preparedness Coordinators. We know what is going on in our neighborhood because we check each neighbor and take care of their needs, but the City remains ignorant about your grass roots and the citizens whom you are supposed to be serving. Sitting in an EOC without lots of eyes in the field is arrogant, dumb and dangerous. This is what the City of Palo Alto says to their ESV’s "The City needs information from the neighborhoods to know the big picture and focus on getting resources to where the need is greatest. " And more important for the long run, many local citizens will have lost faith in the ability and willingness of their elected City Councils and Fire Board to make hard and bold choices in this challenging time. That loss of faith will have a profound impact on your ability to lead long into the future. Peter On Apr 21, 2020, at 10:52 AM, Peter Carpenter Dear Fire Board, The County, the City of Menlo Park and the City of East Palo Alto have turned their backs on the volunteer effort that is underway in the non-Atherton portions of the Fire District. Notably the Town of Atherton has given ADAPT strong institutional and financial support and is using ADAPT as a very cost effective force multiplier. The abandoned volunteers are pressing forward on our own. So far the only outside funding has been a $10k grant that Jane and I made to support these efforts. These recently recruited volunteers need training that is specific to the communication network focus for the current Covid 19 pandemic. They do not need the full FEMA certified CERT training. I fully understand that such training cannot and should not be a high priority of the Fire District - which sadly had to do such training in the past BECAUSE the cities failed to fulfill their statuatory responsibility to do that training. The volunteers will develop and run a training program but they need funding to do so. I urge the Fire Board to support the Fire Chief’s discretionary authority to provide $50k to support volunteer training on a priority basis. I also suggest that the Fire District ask Facebook to volunteer some of their best people and resources to help us develop the needed Covid 19 specific volunteer effort training material - which could then be used nationwide. Thank you, Peter Received on Thu Apr 23 2020 - 08:31:06 PDT