DeFalco cites staffing and cost concerns with mobile fountain bill

Well, Councilman, first of all, we very much appreciate your advocacy on this issue, and we're very proud of our product.

So it's not that we don't want to be out there making sure that people have no issue getting it.

That said, I think that some of the logistical problems that we see with the bill, there are large challenges in terms of cost and workforce.

So temperature aside, we...

You need two people per station.

So you're looking at more than 100 people, more people than we would just be adding to the Bureau of Coastal Resiliency that we just mentioned, in order to be able to even staff those.

We don't have 100-plus fountains.

I mean, those are some of the logistical problems.

How many fountains do we have available?

The ones that we have now that we use for emergencies, nine.

Nine.

I know I've seen them put out in all sorts of circumstances.

So there's a capital request to getting more fountains.

Is that an issue?

Well, right now we use them for emergency purposes only in the last few years in terms of like water outages or water main break.

I've seen them when we do like open streets or on the street or.

We've reduced that program pretty significantly because of the overtime costs.

And also because with increased flooding, we've started to direct resources toward things like flooding town halls and other things.

You know, we found that a lot of those, as much as we would like to be able to do that, there are other ways.

That are less resource dependent, that people can get access to water.

I think during, especially heat days, more than 600 cooling stations, more than 3,400 water fountains in public parks.

The way that this bill is set up right now, we'd be millions of dollars it would cost to set this up.

But is there a way to, you know, we obviously keep talking about it, but

There's a way to narrowly tail this to ensure, like, this is my concern, and I see it in parts of my district.

where there's just not publicly available water fountains and there aren't cooling stations that are readily available for some of our young people.

So your answer is to build more cooling stations instead of just putting out water fountains.

Is that what you're suggesting?

I would defer to NISM on the setup and the actual locations for those cooling stations.

But given that you've already got people staffing,

Those stations there already exist as they exist.

That might be one opportunity.

I think that this might be something that we could talk about in terms of is this something that should be DEP's core function.

The money to pay for this would be the same money that comes from our water rate money, so money that we use for flood protection and mitigation.

It's probably worth talking about.

The idea is noble, whether it belongs in this agency or how it might be done in partnership with other agencies as opposed to DEP doing it by itself.

I hear your concern that maybe DEP may not be the right agency because you're not doing as much publicly facing work in this relationship where other agencies are out on the street.

Providing services to people, you know, OEM, other agencies where they're just have a publicly facing, especially during heat event, you know, events in our city.

So you're saying that some collaboration could be a better approach to doing it and not focusing on DEP.

Is that what I hear?

Yes, I think that there's another way to do it.

Our core focus, especially during heat emergencies,

making sure that our system is operating.

closing hydrants, you know, making sure that those core functions and responsibilities are happening.

In order to set these up, we'd be using people who do those operations.

You know, we don't have enough people to actually stay with the fountains by themselves.

So if they're not staffed,

People don't always use them as intended, we found in the past.

So that's why it might make sense to set it up differently than to just have standalone temporary moving fountains.