By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Sionna Stallings-Ala’ilima
For the last eight-and-a-half months, Sionna Stallings-Ala’ilima has served as Tacoma Fire Department’s (TFD)’s interim fire chief. Now, the Hawai’i-born Stallings-Ala’ilima is being considered to fill the role permanently.
If she is appointed by the City Manager, and confirmed by the City Council, Stallings-Ala’ilima will be the first Samoan woman to fill the role of fire chief.
In a virtual “meet the candidate” event on March 20, Stallings-Ala’ilima told attendees a little bit about her proposed solutions to several service challenges the TFD currently faces, if she were chosen to be fire chief. These solutions include implementing a regional alternative response team, creating mobile urgent care units, and creating more receiving facilities for community members in crisis.
Hired by TFD in 2007, the Maui born-and-raised Stallings-Ala’ilima spent most of her time with the department in the South and Eastside stations. Over the years, in addition to being a firefighter, she has held a series of different roles within the department, including being a paramedic, lieutenant, captain, and medical services officer.
According to the department’s internal data, in 2024, TFD personnel responded to more than 53,000 calls for service, most of which were medical emergencies. Of those medical emergencies, more than half required transportation to the hospital.
All told, Stallings-Ala’ilima shared with attendees, the TFD has seen a 42% increase in call volume since 2010.
Correspondingly, the department is preparing to increase the number of fire engines that serve Tacoma. Currently, that number stands at 16—but once an engine passes the 2,500 calls-per-year mark, Stallings-Ala’ilima said, a department should be prepared to add another engine.
“As you can see,” Stallings-Ala’ilima said, as she presented a color-coded slide showing the frequency of dispatch per TFD engine, “twelve of our 16 engines are already running more than 2,500 calls. And out of the seven red engines on the map, four of those are above 4,500 calls already. And one actually hit 5,000 calls this year for the first time in TFD history.”
“This trend,” she continued, “is unsustainable.”
But call volume isn’t the only metric a fire department uses to measure its progress and needs. It also needs to examine congestion and travel times. The department has a four-minute goal, Stallings-Ala’ilima said, meaning that TFD personnel aim to get to a call for service within four minutes.
Currently, this isn’t possible, Stallings-Ala’ilima said.
“The brown area around each station is how far an engine can travel, during a portion of the day with traffic congestion,” Stallings-Ala’ilima said, in the course of explaining a visual map of the travel time data. “The green section shows in the middle of the night with no traffic, how far they can get.”
“So, as you can see, in the light yellow that surrounds all that brown and green, there are many portions of our district that even if all of our engines were sitting ready in their stations, we wouldn’t be able to reach within that four minute goal,” she continued. “Some of this is due to the topography of our region, but also due to station locations. We’ve only built three new stations in the last 30 years. The rest have been in place for a long time, many since the early- to mid-1900s.”
TFD projects that expected population increases within the next year will only exacerbate this issue. But Stallings-Ala’ilima already has a map of solutions, informed by her many years in several TFD roles.
Keeping up with the increase in calls for service will require more revenue. Much of the TFD’s operations are grant-funded, Stallings-Ala’ilima said, and she plans to prioritize sending personnel to training to keep the TFD competitive in those grant-seeking processes. However, she said, the revenue the TFD needs will need to be sustainable in the long-term—“and that’s gonna include a lot more people than just me,” Stallings-Ala’ilima said.
It will take Tacoma city leadership and management to “identify what our opportunities are and what our plan moving forward is,” she said. From this, Stallings-Ala’ilima hopes that the department can make progress on a regional coordination of non-emergent response.
Because of the state of the health care system, Stallings-Ala’ilima said, people are forced to turn to emergency rooms for their primary care, which is causing hospital overcrowding. Stallings-Ala’ilima said that she would like to see a regional alternative response team, much like the one the City of Tacoma launched in 2021.
Stallings-Ala’ilima heads one branch of the city’s alternative response team, called the Holistic Outreach Promoting Engagement (HOPE) team. She said that next steps are to increase staffing, provide 24-hour service, and have personnel directly dispatched by the state’s 988 suicide prevention line, in the future.
Stallings-Ala’ilima also said that she recently came across a mobile urgent care program called Dispatch Health, which is partnered with the Denver Fire Department in Colorado. The dispatch teams could do everything an urgent care clinic did. Stallings-Ala’ilima said that she envisions such a dispatch system for TFD.
“They could do labs, they can do X-rays, they can prescribe medications, give medications. I think they can even splint and put on casts if needed. They really were meeting that community member in the place that they needed that help,” she said. “I think that building collaborative partnerships like this will be mutually beneficial for both us and the hospital.”
Stallings-Ala’ilima said that the area also needs more receiving facilities.
Last March, Pierce County lost two of its crisis recovery care services in Fife and Parkland, after operator Recovery Innovations abruptly stopped service, citing financial concerns. Stallings-Ala’ilima shared in-meeting that, last Tuesday, she heard that a new one would soon be opened. But this does not solve the problem the TFD and other emergency responders face.
“Bringing back one is a start,” she said, “but even when we had two in the county, not too long ago, they were always full.”
In addition to increasing the number of receiving facilities, Stallings-Ala’ilima said that there needed to be an increase in capacity, given the overlap of increasing calls for service and a growing area population.
But substantially expanding service and capacity requires money—money that the TFD just might not be able to get.
Given that the city recently went through what an attendee termed, during the Q&A portion of the meeting, a “difficult” budget process, and a proposed bond to fund TFD equipment failed to pass, how would Stallings-Ala’ilima ensure the department stays financially sustainable, even as she worked to maintain and improve service levels?
Stallings-Ala’ilima said that she hoped “we will be able to talk about other options for revenue in the future,” but that the department applied for a grant to fund two more engines. While the department has not yet heard back, she said, “We also are looking at potentially other partnerships with—not sponsorships, per se, but looking at other avenues of acquiring apparatus.”
“We’re basically throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks at this point,” she admitted, “because we’re trying our best to not decrease the level of service that we’re providing the community.”
“Unfortunately, we can’t afford to do this for very much longer,” she continued. “And so some tough decisions will likely need to be made and that will fall to me and I won’t take those lightly.”
In terms of increasing capacity, she said, because the bond failed, “we are going to need to rely on community partnerships to help locate new response units where we need them.”
Another attendee asked how Stallings-Ala’ilima would engage with the community to understand their specific needs and priorities, when it came to fire, emergency medical response, and alternative response.
Stallings-Ala’ilima said that TFD has a few touch points in this realm. In addition to crews who get feedback from the community, the department started a community advisory committee in 2021. The department has liaisons who attend neighborhood meetings and meet with community groups, and also puts out periodic surveys.
In response to a question about how, under Stallings-Ala’ilima, TFD would plan to better serve individuals experiencing homelessness or a mental health crisis, Stallings-Ala’ilima said that she will be both deferring to the HOPE team and community feedback, and simultaneously doing her best to remove any barriers the HOPE team faces, including financial challenges. There is “a lot” of legislation at the state level around mental health and behavioral health right now, Stallings-Ala’ilima said, and she wouldn’t doubt that there are different grants and funding opportunities.
“A little bit of investment early could pay off in the future,” Stallings-Ala’ilima said. “I’m not really sure what that’s gonna look like. I don’t think any of us [do], but I think that that’s the direction we’re headed.”
Carolyn Bick can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.