Borderless fire service

CHENEY – Now that Medical Lake’s fire service has been annexed into Spokane County Fire District 3, are there other fire agencies in the region considering the same scenario?

That was a question posed by the Medical Lake City Council at its Sept. 17 meeting to District 3 Deputy Chief Don Crawford. Crawford told the council the city of Cheney has been watching the district’s model for years, prompting Medical Lake City Administrator Doug Ross to ask if they might be the next “domino” to fall, with agencies on the West Plains collaborating in creating a regional fire authority (RFA).

“If you went to the (Cheney Fire Department) rank and file, they’d have done it yesterday,” Crawford said, adding political reasons are preventing such a move.

While acknowledging politics are involved, Cheney officials pointed to other reasons why their domino will continue to stand.

“Right now it’s business as usual with our fire department,” Mayor Chris Grover said. “If we did do something different, we would do due diligence and make sure it’s in our citizens’ best interests.”

City Administrator Mark Schuller and Fire Chief Tom Jenkins agreed, noting regional fire authorities occur more in Western Washington than with agencies east of the Cascade Mountains. Jenkins said RFAs came about — particularly in the Puget Sound region — because city borders are less visibly defined, creating response confusion. RFAs are a way to seamlessly unite services.

According to the Regional Fire Authority Implementation Guide, an RFA is a separate municipal corporation and taxing district in Washington that can include fire districts and city fire departments. The RFA is created by a vote of the people, and follows a specific operations plan formulated by a planning committee, consisting of three elected officials from each governing body in the jurisdictions, and approved by the voters in the service area.

Jenkins said Medical Lake’s move was annexation, not regionalization. The need to join with District 3 came because of financial reasons and emergency response, in that roughly 26 percent of calls to the department were going unanswered. Cheney is able to answer its calls, running a five-minute response time average depending upon where the responding crew is in the city at the time of the call.

What Cheney is experiencing is a situation where they are often “doubling up,” being on one call and getting a summons to respond to another. That has precipitated the need for mutual aid agreements with other fire agencies such as District 3, District 10, Airway Heights, Fairchild Air Force Base and the city of Spokane. Jenkins said this has led to a “dropping of borders” so that other agencies can come into another’s jurisdiction and provide assistance.

As an example, Jenkins pointed to the Washington Square Apartment fire in August 2017 where Cheney and District 3 responded and were assisted by the four other agencies. To make sure calls didn’t go unanswered, a unit from Medical Lake’s department manned Cheney’s station.

“I’d never abandon the city,” Jenkins said. “If we have to go out, we call in another fire agency.”

Jenkins said they have increased staffing, and now have nine fulltime firefighters on duty. They’re backed by 18 part-paid firefighters, volunteers who agree to serve as a station resident for one day every nine days.

It provides the potential to have five firefighters on duty at any one time.

“In this system, if they’re on shift, they’re on shift,” Jenkins said.

Schuller said rising costs are a challenge with maintaining the city’s fire department. Cheney recently purchased a fully-outfitted, state of the art main fire attack engine for $867,000, using $300,000-$400,000 of money raised through the yearly public services levy with a low-interest state loan funding the rest.

Employee benefits are also rising, with agencies spending up to $3,000 per firefighter to purchase new gear such as turnouts. Then there’s training — all of which has fueled the need for agencies to collaborate where they can, such as training with the creation of the West Plains Fire Academy.

Schuller said the idea of a collaboration such as is happening with Medical Lake and District 3 has come up, starting several years ago when a Cheney firefighter came back from a conference where such an arrangement was presented. Instead of merging with another district, Schuller said better agreements with nearby agencies were set up.

“We rely on them, they rely on us,” he added. And while not ruled out, he, Jenkins and Grover all said to go down the regionalization road would require answering several questions.

“How would the level of service change for the city of Cheney?” Schuller asked.

“As long as they’re not talking about the color of the truck, they’re in it for the right reasons,” Jenkins said of annexation or regionalization. “At the end of the day, you dial 911, you want somebody to show up, you don’t care about the color of the truck. We’ve torn the borders down and understand the benefits of collaboration.”

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].