Agenda - Council - 08/13/2013 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Ramsey, Nowthen, St. Francis, Oak Grove, and Bethel, Minnesota Feasibility Study for Shared or Cooperative Fire and Emergency Services resources need not be identical. For instance, one community may send an engine to the other community on automatic response to structure fires, while the second community agrees to send a water tender to the first community's structure fire calls in exchange. These reciprocal agreements are sometimes made without detailed concern over quantification of the equality of the services exchanged, since they promote the effectiveness of overall services in both communities. In other cases, the written agreements spell out costs that one community can charge the other for services, typically where no reasonable reciprocation can be anticipated. One primary purpose of automatic aid agreements is to improve the regional application of resources and staffing. Since fire protection resources are most frequently established because of the occupancy risks in a community and not necessarily a heavy workload, these resources may be idle during frequent periods of time. While fire departments make productive use of this time through training, drills, pre - incident planning, and other functions, the fact is that these expensive resources of apparatus and staff are not heavily tied up on emergency incidents. Communities that share certain resources back and forth are, in essence, expanding the emergency response workload of those units across a larger geographic area that generally ignores jurisdictional lines. This expanded use of resources can strongly benefit both communities that might otherwise have significantly increased costs if they had to procure and establish all the same resources alone. Automatic aid can be used effectively to bolster a community's fire protection resources, or to reduce unnecessary redundancy and overlap between communities. page 68 {nc eyssay Sendref Ce ttivigne