(ABC 6 News) – The Rochester City Council is hearing the fire department’s six-year plan to adapt and grow with the city.

This updated strategic plan comes after the Rochester Fire Department has seen a large increase in calls, especially emergency medical service calls, or EMSs. RFD’s will primarily focus on building better support of wellness for employees and breaking down barriers in their hiring process.

“We’re lucky in Rochester to have a fire department that does long-term planning and does not just react to things that are just going on,” said Ward 1 Councilmember Patrick Keane, ahead of the study session.

RFD is planning for growth alongside the city’s population but their biggest challenge in the last three years has been call volumes increasing.

“For the most part, what we see is that our fire related calls,” Assistant Fire Chief Caleb Feine said. “While they are increasing slightly, remain relatively consistent but our EMS calls and other calls for service are increasing rapidly.”

When RFD does respond to EMS calls, they often come with firetrucks, which can take that resource away to respond to other calls.

“And that’s specifically what we’re looking to address, how we look at those calls without having to have a specific piece of equipment,” said Feine.

Keane says addressing the immediate need of staffing will help the fire department in the long run.

“The key thing in this report, to me, is the staffing of emergency response techs because if you look at our call volume we have so many, ‘Help, I’ve fallen down,’ sort of calls and, right now, we’re dispatching big fire trucks to help with those,” Keane said.

And it’s important for both Feine and Keane to see solutions to these issues now, so future city leaders and fire fighters can have the best response possible to help the people of the Med City.

“We’re really just trying to make aware that we have some really, really awesome challenges coming up. We just want to make sure that everybody’s aware of them so that we can meet them when we learn more about them,” Feien said.

“In the future, if we do this strategy right, if we can bump with the investments because it does take money to do this stuff. And as our tax base grows, that’s how we’ll fund this,” said Keane.

RFD will continue to take feedback both from city officials and citizens of Rochester on how they can continue to best serve the Med City.