Fire Department to Undergo Review for Accreditation

From January 5-9, 2020, the Southlake Fire Department will host an Accreditation Assessment Team from the Center for Public Safety Excellence/Commission on Fire Accreditation International (CPSE/CFAI). The Assessment Team is composed of four peer assessors from other fire departments throughout the country.

The accreditation process is a means of establishing industry-wide performance measures to determine and evaluate the level of overall organizational performance. As with the police services, the fire department is required to go through an onsite peer assessment once every five years to determine the department’s ongoing compliance in 10 main categories. Contained within the 9th edition FESSAM categories are 45 criterions, each of which is further broken down into 252 detailed performance indicators. The end result creates what is known as the “self-assessment manual” for fire services.

The onsite review will be conducted at Southlake’s FD Headquarters with the Fire Chiefs Conference Room serving as the primary file validation and verification location. The assessors will start arriving January 5, 2020 and depart by the afternoon of January 9, 2020.  In addition to file validation and verification, the assessors will conduct interviews and tours of our City, facilities and mutual aid locations.

The Fire Department is looking forward to hopefully receiving a recommendation of reaccreditation by the peer assessment team for its 5th five-year term.