Personnel throughout the District spent the past week making final preparations for the arrival of the CFAI Peer Assessment Team. The large fire prevention conference room at Admin has been reconfigured as their primary work area and the adjacent small conference room has been setup as an office for Chief Wayne Senter, the assessment team leader. One of the key accomplishments of the week was the publication of the new Self-Assessment Manual. This version includes all the additions and revisions required by the team during their comprehensive pre-visit review. Although more changes are certain during their visit, this release brought us current with our commitments to date. This 360-page document answers more than two hundred questions about the current practices of our agency and outlines our future plans for improvement. It is available for review on the District website under Key Documents and includes hyperlinks to the thousands of pages of exhibits used to support our responses to the team and the Commission.

Also wrapped up this week was the design of the formal District Tour. A critical component of accreditation and the Standards of Cover deployment analysis is to determine whether our agency is capable of providing service commensurate with our responsibilities, jurisdictional risks and service level objectives. The District tour is designed to help the assessors confirm the unique risks and challenges of the community first hand and to see the geographic diversity of the Valley. Stops along the way include Chevron, AT&T, the City Center parcels in Bishop Ranch, San Ramon Regional Medical Center, high-risk Wildland Urban Interface areas, among many others. The tour also presents a good opportunity to review and discuss our award-winning Pre-Incident Aerial Survey Program.

As the team begins to arrive in town tomorrow (yes, on Mother’s Day!) I plan to increase the frequency of my posts to at least daily to keep everyone up to speed on what is happening with the evaluation. On behalf of our Board of Directors and the community I would like to extend my appreciation to all members of the District that have work tirelessly to improve service levels and to increase the public value of our agency—and for getting us to this key point in the international accreditation process. Hopefully next Friday we can begin planning to have our team in Chicago for the August commission hearings. Either way, it’s going to be an interesting and historic week around here.