Both city and county residents may see some changes in fire department service with the adoption of a new pact between the Fayetteville City Council and the Fayette County Commission that pares down automatic responses into each other’s territories to only fire calls, and also limits the number of units automatically crossing territories for each call.
The City Council agreed to the plan last week and the County Commission is expected to do the same at its Thursday afternoon meeting.
In the past, the closest units responded to all calls, including wrecks and deaths, regardless of whether the call originated in the city or the county, said Fayetteville Fire Chief Alan Jones. Depending on the location of trucks and the incident, the plan sometimes resulted in more county units at a scene in the city than city trucks or vice versa, he added.
The new agreement allows automatic response of the closest unit for residential and commercial fire only and allows only one city unit to respond in the county or one county unit to respond in the city.
“We’re scaling back on the types of resources we’re committing to each other,” Jones said. “It is a different agreement. It will change some of the responses. It’s definitely going to change to some degree. What I think, though, is for the most part, the closest units will still be responding.”
Jones can envision times when city dispatchers may hear something like a cardiac arrest call for help and realize the closest unit might need to cross jurisdictions even though the call is not for firefighting, he said. “There are solutions to that. We have to meet with personnel and go through that kind of thing. We certainly will be attentive to what’s going on.”
The new automatic aid agreement pertains only to automatic responses and does not affect the two governments’ “mutual aid” agreement that allows fire departments to help colleagues in other jurisdictions when extra help is requested, Jones said.
Changes to the automatic aid agreement come on the heels of a controversial proposal made earlier this year to consolidate the city and county fire departments. The proposal inflamed some city residents and was eventually dropped by city officials.
“Whatever helps Fayetteville succeed is OK with us,” County Commission Chairman Steve Brown said of the decision to drop any consolidation proposal.
However, county officials were already looking into the number of fire unit responses being made into the city and found that roughly 1,000 responses were being made per year, he added.
That number prompted county officials to initiate some changes to the agreement.
“We agreed that was not very fair” to the county residents who pay a special tax for fire department service, Brown said. “We have to be fair. We cannot justify that many calls (into the city) to our taxpayers. We just want a fair exchange of service.”
— By LISA FINGEROOT
lfingeroot@gmail.com
