Weekly Update

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Friends,

As your mayor, I spend quite a bit of time and energy addressing situations that need improvement in our city. That’s what you elected me to do, after all.

There are areas within city government, however, where the service level is already impressive. Today, I'll highlight not just the accomplishments of the Memphis Fire Department, but the volume and scope of what it does each and every day for us.

Here are some highlights from 2016:

  • MFD responded to 138,609 incidents, many of which required multiple resources being dispatched. That's an average of 380 incidents per day, 16 incidents per hour, or an incident every 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
  • Of those incidents, Emergency Medical Services accounted for 85 percent -- 117,268 of them.
  • Of the incidents, 2,494 were actual structure fires.
  • Our Fire Communications Center maintained a 12.17-second average call answer time, with 92 percent of all 911 calls being answered in less than 20 seconds.
  • The Fire Prevention team completed 16,573 occupancy inspections.

Pretty impressive stuff, right?

This comes to mind every month when we pore over data at our monthly performance review. Our response time to residential fires consistently comes in at less than the goal of 5 minutes and 20 seconds. We celebrate it briefly, but move on to the next issue. That’s human nature, but it doesn’t mean we should ignore just how impressive that consistency is.

So thank you, Director Gina Sweat and all of the men and women of Memphis Fire. Your quiet commitment to your fellow citizens is an inspiration to all of us. Next time you see a fire fighter or a fire fighter/paramedic, I hope you thank them and let them know how proud you are of them, too.

Doing more for our young people: I promised you when I campaigned for mayor that I would work tirelessly on this. We’re seeing the fruits of that labor, too.

This week, for the first time ever, we held spring break camps in our community centers. On one particular day, 860 of our young people participated in programming all across our city.

And you may have seen in the news of our plans to invite the local Boys & Girls Clubs to expand into three of our community centers -- Charles Powell Community Center in Westwood, the Hollywood Community Center the Hollywood community in North Memphis, and McFarland Community Center in Parkway Village.

By expanding this public-private partnership, we can serve more young people than the city currently has resources to serve.

Need a job?: Memphis International Airport is holding a job fair on April 5. Learn more here.

Thank you, NAWBO: The local chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners held a reception Thursday to celebrate the progress we've made in just one year in increasing the city's contracting efforts with minority and women-owned businesses.

Hughetta Dudley, the CEO of Stragistics Technologies, was even nice enough to produce this video!

Thanks for stopping by: Did you see the story about the congressmen from Texas who drove together all the way to Washington, D.C. a few days ago? As it turns out, Rep. Beto O’Rourke -- a Democrat -- and Rep. Will Hurd -- a Republican -- dropped by Graceland and enjoyed some donuts at Gibson’s as they journeyed eastward.

This story is pretty cool -- and not just because they happened to enjoy themselves in Memphis. It was nice to see a Democrat and a Republican work together, even if it was just for a couple of days.

Yours,
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