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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-fire-response-
20120324,0,6081056.story

In reaction to ongoing controversy over emergency response 
times, a Los Angeles city councilman on Friday called for full 
funding to be restored to the Fire Department, whose budget has 
been slashed by more than 15% over the last three years.

The appeal from Councilman Paul Koretz came during a special 
council committee hearing in which Los Angeles Fire Chief Brian 
Cummings faced tough questions about how his department measures 
its responses to calls for help.

Koretz said he was dismayed by recent revelations that the 
department for years overstated how fast it was arriving on the 
scene of medical emergencies. Response times, he said, translate 
to survival rates. And the department's latest statistics, which 
show it arriving at the scene of medical emergencies within five 
minutes only 60% of the time, means "we are not serving people 
in emergencies fast enough," he said.

Two weeks ago, department officials admitted that they had been 
using a bad formula to calculate their response times. This 
week, amid criticism about other discrepancies in the 
department's statistics, Cummings acknowledged that fire 
officials had presented the council and other city leaders with 
times that were projections based on computerized modeling, 
instead of actual performance numbers.

"This is not brain surgery," Councilman Mitchell Englander said 
at Friday's Public Safety Committee meeting, adding that he was 
"more frustrated than ever" to hear that the department had been 
using simulated data for response times from 2008 through 2010. 
"We already had the real data."

Cummings defended the methodology, which he said enabled the 
department to compare different "what if" scenarios while making 
decisions about where to cut resources.

The chief told the panel that lawmakers were made aware last 
year that cutbacks would result in longer response times. "It 
was clearly stated ... there will be an impact on response 
times," Cummings said. "Less is going to be less."

But committee members said the department should have made it 
explicit that the figures presented in reports they considered 
while making the cuts were actually projections.

Councilman Paul Krekorian pointed to a 2011 report to Mayor 
Antonio Villaraigosa that presented the data as fact, instead of 
projection.

"Would we do things different now?" Cummings said in response. 
"Probably."

It's been a tough two weeks for Cummings, who has also faced 
questions about the department's aging dispatch system. The 
Times has reported that equipment problems led to slow responses 
on several occasions around the city.

Cummings took heat on another front after he announced Tuesday 
that the department was halting its long-standing practice of 
releasing basic information about medical emergencies.

The mayor quickly ordered Cummings to immediately resume 
releasing the information, saying the department "needs more 
transparency � not less."

Villaraigosa has also sought to quell concerns about the 
department's transparency and performance. On Thursday, he 
called for the appointment of Jeff Godown, a former director of 
the Los Angeles Police Department's crime-tracking Compstat 
Bureau, to oversee the Fire Department's statistical analysis.

And he called for the activation of six additional ambulances, 
which would rotate for 10-hour shifts at fire stations around 
the city depending on the volume of emergency calls.

A budget analyst in the office of the chief administrative 
officer said it would cost more than $500,000 to staff the 
ambulances until the end of the fiscal year and said it was 
unclear how the new positions � and Godown's salary � would be 
paid for.

It's also unclear whether Koretz's call to restore funding to 
the department is possible, given the city's ongoing financial 
woes.

Englander said the City Council will not be able to make any 
budget decisions until it sees the results of the city 
controller's pending audit of Fire Department response times. 
"That's the most important thing right now," he said. "What are 
the real numbers?"