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By DONNAMY STEELE / Special to the Reporter

ALABASTER – The new year is bringing in change and improvements for the Alabaster Fire Department.

As 2021 begins, so does the final stage of the department’s five-year strategic plan that was drafted in 2016.

Alabaster Fire Chief Tim Love is working on ways to reach out to the community and city stakeholders for the next five-year plan while also looking back on the success the department has acquired over the last few years.

Love said despite COVID, the department has made a tremendous amount of progress since 2016.

This includes addressing things like when to purchase and budget, having a good maintenance plan, getting rid of old apparatus and getting new, and reducing maintenance costs drastically.

“At the end of the year we reminded the staff to look forward to the new year and see what we have accomplished in 2020,” Love said. “We’ve really concentrated on the safety aspect of our personnel. We know we have a long way to go in a lot of areas, but we have accomplished quite a bit in the last five years, but especially in the last two where we really focused on accomplishing things.

“We really have done a good job with that portion of it, and we have been able to grow our paramedic core, and pay-wise our people are happy,” he continued. “That’s a huge accomplishment that the city and mayor have been really good with us for.”

The new five-year plan is expected to be finalized by this summer and is being worked on currently.

The department is attempting to gather information from the stakeholders in Alabaster to ensure they are moving in the direction they think the department should move, Love said. In order to do this, an electronic survey will be sent out to 1,000 people.

The data will then be compiled, giving the people a chance to have an input in what the department is doing in the community.

The details of the survey will be hashed out and delivered to the community’s emails by the end of the month, Love said.

“We are getting a survey together with business owners, faculty, administrators, locals and more,” he said. “We plan to send out at least 1,000 surveys, and hopefully we will get a good portion of these back. It helps us determine our future with stakeholders in the department, things that they like or dislike about the department, and give them an idea of the services we provide. And if we are meeting expectations in the committee and are doing what we do in alignment with our city’s needs.”

Love encourages locals and business owners to be on the lookout for the survey over the next few weeks.

“We want a broad spectrum of people, average citizens who live here, people who own businesses here, to participate,” Love said. “They are all important people we interact with, and we want to find out what we can from them.”