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Ramsey, Nowthen, St. Francis, Oak Grove, and Bethel, Minnesota Feasibility Study for Shared or Cooperative Fire and Emergency Services they have very little day to day contact otherwise. Under this level of mutual aid, specific resources are typically requested by the fire department, through the appropriate chain of command, and sometimes coordinated by local or regional emergency management personnel. Depending on the level of the request, the response can sometimes be slow and the authorization process may be cumbersome due to the exchange of official information or even elected official's approval that may be required. Written Mutuof Aid Agreements This form of mutual aid takes the previous form one step further by formalizing written agreements between communities (typically immediate neighbors in a region) in an effort to simplify the procedures and, thus, cut response time. Usually, these written agreements include a process that takes the request and response authorization down to a lower level in the organization, such as the Fire Chief or other incident commander. By signing such agreements, communities are "pre -authorizing" the deployment of their resources under specified circumstances as spelled out in the agreement. Most often, these agreements are generally reciprocal in nature and rarely involve an exchange of money for service, though they may include methods for reimbursement of unusual expenses for long deployments. Automatic Aid Agreements Once again, this form of mutual aid takes the process an additional step further by spelling out certain circumstances under which one or more community's specific resources will respond automatically upon notification of a reported incident in the neighboring community. In essence, automatic aid agreements expand a community's initial first alarm response to certain types of incidents by adding resources from a nearby neighbor to that response protocol. Typically, such agreements are for specific geographic areas where the neighbor's resource can be expected to have a reasonable response time and are for only specific types of incidents. An example of such an agreement would be having a neighboring community's engine respond to all reported structure fires in an area where it would be closer than the second or third -due engine from the home community. In other cases, the agreement might cover a type of resource, such as a water tender or aerial ladder, than the home community does not possess. An example of this would be having a neighboring community's water tender respond to all reported structure fires in the areas of the home community that do not have pressurized hydrants. Automatic aid agreements may be purely reciprocal or they may involve the exchange of money for the services provided. Purely reciprocal agreements are common, but typically are used where each community has some resource or service it can provide to the benefit of the other. These services or 4• Emergency Services Consnkilug page 67 I