In just 30 days, Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks has presided over the removal of public safety professionals in four communities, including all 24 of Greenbelt's career firefighters and emergency medical staff.

Why Was This Done? By choosing to enforce a budget reduction that represents only .05% of the County's overall budget, these four communities are losing our career firefighters until more new firefighters can be recruited and trained whenever and however long that takes.

What Does This Mean? Overnight, volunteer firefighters were asked to pick up the slack with no notice. The net effect is, according to the County's Fire Chief Tiffany Green, that our response times to local emergencies will at least double. Greenbelt has become less safe and ready to respond to protect its residents, nearby communities, and the hundreds of thousands of drivers that transit the nearby Baltimore Washington Parkway and the 495 Beltway.

What Are Cities Doing to Keep Their Residents Safe? This action was so unacceptable that on June 28th, the City of Greenbelt, the City of College Park and the Town of Berwyn Heights filed a Temporary Restraining Order to protest the the Prince George's County's Fire Staffing Reallocation Plan that would reassign career personnel from Fire/EMS Stations 814 Berwyn Heights and Fire/EMS Station 835 Greenbelt and two other stations.

Their ask was simple: reasonable time to make a good plan with Prince George's County to ensure our public safety supports were adequate to protect residents. This Temporary Restraining Order was dismissed on July 1 by the judge because cities did not have the data to prove negative impacts would occur. The reason we do not have this data is because the County doesn't report it publicly.

Now we need residents of Greenbelt, Berwyn Heights, College Park, Bowie-Bel Air, and Bunker Hill as well as all surrounding communities to join with us to demand a better path forward. Our ask is simple: Listen to city officials who have asked for common sense actions to keep residents safe.

 Specifically we join our city officials in asking the following asks included in the Temporary Restraining Order:

1) Make a plan together by establishing a partnership Taskforce of key the stakeholders affected by this decision and with the right expertise in the room.
2) Release the data we need to make better decisions and ensure accountability as other counties do across the State of Maryland.
3) Support our volunteer firefighters in becoming better prepared to deliver essential public safety services while new career firefighters are recruited and trained.
4) Keep communication lines open by meeting regularly to assess our plans and make sure they are working and responding to real-world conditions.

If you agree that these four basic steps are more than reasonable, please sign our petition calling on County Executive Alsobrooks to come to the table.

Ask your neighbors to join you! You could save a life.