Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Making policy

Negotiations for a new agreement picked up this fall. The city and fire district have met every two weeks since the first meeting on Sept. 29. The next meeting will be held at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Daniel Boone Building, 701 E. Broadway in the 9th floor conference room.

Watkins, who has called response times “one critical component” of renegotiating the agreement, said he has never seen response time data from the fire district. He also has said he is not aware of any study directly comparing the Fire Department and the fire district.

Instead, the negotiations have focused on financial and operational aspects.

Financially, the city “cannot continue to live with” higher payments to the fire district, Watkins said. Payments would reach $1.5 million in 2013 if the current agreement remained unchanged.

Budgets for both agencies are tight, Griggs said. He said he would like to see “a mutually equitable reimbursement” in any new deal.

The outcome could have a significant effect on the fire district’s finances. The last payment, $550,000, made up about 16 percent of the district’s $3.4 million budget.

“It will have a major impact on us if we lose that,” Paulsell said.

But operational aspects, such as deciding which agency responds to annexed areas of the city, must also be resolved in any new pact.

Watkins and Paulsell have said the closest unit should respond, and that does not always happen under the current agreement.

In a June 2 letter to the mayor and City Council, Watkins wrote: “I favor an agreement which is based on first available response rather than a hard territory line.”

“I’m looking for a pay-per-service kind of deal” where “if (the fire district) provide X units of service, we pay them a fair amount for that,” he said.

There’s one big obstacle: State law dictates that territorial agreements be paid according to assessed value, not number of calls.

While negotiations progress, both Stonecrest and Stoneridge neighborhoods have told city government they want city fire service.

In an Oct. 8 letter to Watkins, the Stonecrest Neighborhood Association said since residents there pay city taxes, they should have city service.

“We pay city taxes for city services and expect the emergency response to be included and facilitated by the city and not the county,” the letter reads.

The Stoneridge Homeowners' Association made a similar move. The association took an informal vote at a Nov. 11 meeting to inform Wade that it doesn’t want to be part of the territorial agreement, Haynes said.

Haynes sees a growing city that should be able to tax and provide fire service to its own residents.

“All these areas being annexed have a higher (property) tax valuation. As you move out, the houses get bigger and it costs more,” Haynes said. “The city needs to capitalize on that property value and build more fire stations.”

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

Comparing city and county