City of Powell River committee of the whole is recommending that city council not renew an automatic aid agreement for fire coverage.
At the December 14 committee of the whole meeting, chief administrative officer Russell Brewer said he had been working with qathet Regional District manager of emergency services Ryan Thoms and city fire chief Terry Peters on whether to renew the automatic aid agreement. Brewer said there is a bit of confusion because there is a regional emergency management agreement and a mutual aid agreement with the different electoral areas and fire departments.
“Should we have an event where we need assistance beyond which we can provide we can call on Malaspina or Northside [volunteer fire departments] to help us out, and vice versa, they can call on us if they need help,” said Brewer. “What we’ve had for some time is an automatic aid agreement with Malaspina where, if there is an event in certain areas, we automatically respond, or they automatically respond.
“Although there are provisions in that automatic aid agreement for invoicing and cost recovery, we haven’t exercised those options to date. I had indicated should we renew the automatic aid agreement, the city would start implementing a process where we would invoice for the costs of responding to incidents in Electoral Area B. It wouldn’t amount to a lot.”
Brewer said that was something the regional district was not willing to entertain. He said there had been discussion about reducing the agreement to just fire response, as opposed to emergency response.
“It was felt that we would prefer to invoice for any of our events,” said Brewer. “You will notice in the statistics that the number of events has been tracking up recently.
“I think where we landed with the regional district is we can cover off prospective needs through the mutual aid agreement. We don’t need the auto aid agreement. In practice, the auto aid agreement has been one-sided with the city responding to events in the regional district area.”
Brewer said the risks are if there was a large event in the city that is not well-served by water supply, help with Malaspina fire department’s water tender might be required. He said in that case, the mutual aid agreement would apply.
“We could call on them to help us out,” said Brewer. “In the end, we both agree that the agreement is probably not required. We are well served by the mutual aid agreement.”
According to a staff report, the automatic aid is an agreement where a fire department is dispatched automatically to an agreed upon area outside their normal response area. Mutual aid is an agreement to respond to an incident outside normal response areas on request, typically after the originating fire department responds to a scene and determines help is required.
Brewer said both fire chiefs are of the opinion that the mutual aid agreement will work and that they are not concerned about response times.
Brewer said the recommendation before the committee is that the agreement not be renewed and the same recommendation went before the regional district.
The committee gave unanimous consent to send the matter to city council for a vote.
