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Jason See writes:

The members of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad are up in arms over a recent line item budget addition proposed by the City of Charlottesville. Both the City and the Charlottesville Fire Department feel that the response times by the busiest all-volunteer rescue squad in the country are “unacceptable.” Their solution is simply to drop a million dollars of the taxpayers money to allow the Charlottesville Fire Department to transport their own patients.

Officials with the City and Fire Department were hoping to avoid any public debate so that it “would be all under the radar,” however public outcry has forced the City to create a task force to try to make amends with the volunteers.

Thoughts to chew on include:

• If the City was so concerned with response times, why didn’t they try to work it out with CARS instead of becoming sneaky with the Fire Department?
• Coincidence that the former chief of the department is now City Councilor?
  (wink, wink.nudge, nudge)
• Just think what kind of recruitment and retention program CARS could create to fill the volunteer-void if the City even donated half of that chuck to them, noting that the city never pays a dime for CARS services.
• What would the public think once the Fire Department starts running calls and charging patients for the 6 minute trip to the hospital, when CARS can do the same thing for free?

Rob Seal wrote in the Progress yesterday that an August study shows that unifying city and county fire and rescue services wouldn’t result in any savings, though neither the city nor the county would give a copy of the document to the Progress. (Which I’m not sure they’re legally allowed to withhold.) In his most recent column, Bob Gibson argued that it just doesn’t make sense to keep the services separated. Lone City Council candidate (at this point) Jennifer McKeever isn’t buying the city’s criticism of CARS. And in today’s Progress, Rob Seal and Jeremy Borden describe the area’s planned move to more and more paid rescue employees, moving from our current 91% volunteer rate to something much lower in the next few years.

CARS, to their enormous credit, publishes all of their response times to the web in real time, using Ty Hoeffer’s excellent Rescue Incident Display System. All of those calls are archived, making it trivial to look at their response times. The Albemarle County Fire Department participates in the system, too. But the Charlottesville Fire Department does not, making it impossible to provide a comparative analysis. Jason See was kind enough to go through and weed out all response to calls in the county (which skew response times upwards considerably, of course), providing me with a spreadsheet of 1,338 response times from January 1 through Tuesday. (You can download that spreadsheet, if you like.)

Here’s a histogram of how much time elapses between the call and CARS’ arrival at the scene. It’s a long-tailed normal distribution with a median of 7:29.

And here’s a stacked, filled line graph of the time that it takes to arrive at the scene (the same data as in the histogram) and the time that it takes to get the patient to the hospital, with the total indicating the entire time spent in transit. The median time to the hospital is 6:58 (just 0:31 less than the time to arrive at the scene), and the median total travel time is 13:27.

Also, I looked at the time elapsed from when the call is dispatched and when they’re enroute, and found that the median time elapsed is 1:56, with the great majority between one and three minutes.

Given that the standard response time for life-threatening incidents is eight minutes, it’s noteworthy that the average response time is 7% lower…and that’s including responses to a great many situations that quite likely aren’t life-threating (”sick person,” “back pain,” “childbirth,” etc.) I also have to wonder to what extent any response time problems come from traffic, which the rescue squad can’t control. I have zero experience in rescue, but I have to suspect that the only thing that’s really within their control is how long it takes them to suit up and hit the road.

A source who wishes to remain anonymous tells me:

Kristina Cruise found out this morning she will not be anchoring the 12N and 5P at WVIR anymore. Sharon Gregory will be taking her place on these shows and Laura French will be back next week to anchor the 6 and 11.

This was all, of course, done in the absolute worst fashion. Kristina’s distraught, Sharon’s stuck in the middle…and the fact that most of the newsroom knew this would happen months ago doesn’t make things any easier. To make matters worse, rumor has it they’re only telling her now because she shot a story for The Hook on friday about going head-to-head with Duffy.

But, wait, it gets even more scandalous. From a second source:

The Hook article is supposed to run on Thursday. WVIR managers found out about it and threw a fit. The writing on the wall is that Kristina will eventually be demoted to a reporter…. [M]anagement told her to leave the building today because she is suspended and not allowed back until they decide what to do about the whole mess.

Beth Duffy will be anchoring a pair of daily broadcasts over at the competition beginning on the 16th, though it’ll be the noon and 5pm broadcasts, oddly, and not the 6pm. When she left NBC-29, one of the chief reasons that she cited was a desire to stop working the crazy hours required for her to swing the morning shift. Gray wanted her because they knew she’d be a draw, siphoning off viewers from NBC-29 looking for a familiar face. But it seems odd that they’d put her up on the broadcasts while most people are at work, rather than at what I assume is the more widely-viewed 6pm.

All of this presumably leaves The Hook with a front-page article about a match-up between the two perky young white female anchors, a match-up that may well never happen.

9:25pm Update: I’d been wondering why Sharon Gregory would leave WZVN, in a large market in Florida (64th largest market) to move to a little station in Charlottesville (182nd). Turns out it was her DUI arrest that did it.

The city is planning to build a network of bike trails surrounding the city, paralleling the Rivanna Trail, Seth Rosen reveals in today’s Progress. The city is starting to get easements for twenty miles worth of trails — the same length as the Rivanna Trail — and hopes to begin construction later this year. The easements won’t be finished until 2010, and the trails won’t be done until 2015. The city will create dedicated trails running from the beltway to downtown, too. UVa, frustratingly, isn’t talking with UVa about integrating a bike network of their own with the city’s, but they say they support it in concept.

The simple creation of bike trails will make it viable for people to bike or skate to and from work and school, reducing traffic and giving people an opportunity to improve their health.