TAMPA, Fla — 2023 started with a pretty clear cry to beef up Tampa Fire Rescue resources to keep up with the city's growing population.
"When I moved here 20 years ago, it was very different. It was a lot more quiet," said Lesem Ramos in March.
By midyear, what most could agree on was the need for a master plan—so everyone could know where the department stood and what was needed.
"Number one is for the administration to report on the position of working with local 754 for an updated public safety master plan," said Tampa City Councilman Luis Viera in June.
But as the year continued on, three distinct gaps became pretty clear on their own.
In July, a system failure revealed aging fire rescue technology.
"We did have a system failure with one of the servers," said Tampa Fire Rescue Chief Barbara Tripp in July, "The only thing that is different now is instead of everything being digital and typing on the computer, it's a little manual labor where we have to write some things down."
And just weeks later, concerns about response times led the President of the Tampa Firefighters Local 754 union to continue his calls for three more stations in New Tampa, Channelside, and near the Westshore area.
"For every day that we don't take forward action, we're just setting ourselves two, three steps back," said Nick Stocco in September.
In October, we learned that much-needed fire rescue vehicles were on backorder.
"I need additional transport units to the hospital to accommodate all of the medical calls that we're getting," said Chief Tripp at the time.
All of this culminated in a proposal at the December 7 Tampa City Council meeting. At that time, council members, the fire union, and fire rescue leadership all discussed the prospect of using a more than 100 million dollar bond to help pay for all of these needs.
"This plan of bonding does a couple of real core, critical things. It funds fire station 24 for North Tampa, and we'll talk about that, it refurbishes three stations which is something that is very, very important and it funds a maintenance facility for Tampa Fire Rescue."
But after much discussion, a vote on that bond plan was pushed to January so the council could get more information from staff. Leaving what's next for Tampa Fire Rescue still up in the air.
