SUNDRE – The municipal council approved an updated fire agreement with its Mountain View County counterparts.
“We did in the past have a fire services agreement; it was the first one that we had in place,” Linda Nelson, Sundre’s chief administrative officer, told council on Feb. 26 during a regular meeting.
“So having it in place for the first four years, we did notice a number of areas that really did need some changing,” said Nelson, who praised her colleague and director of corporate services Chris Albert for his involvement.
“It’s very beneficial to both Mountain View County and the Town of Sundre,” she said about the agreement before passing over the mic to Albert.
“We did have a previous agreement in place,” said Albert.
“This (new) agreement was a complete re-work of that agreement. We did notice a number of shortfalls in the original agreement,” he said, adding every effort was made to put forward a fair and equitable agreement that not only more accurately reflects cost-sharing responsibilities but is also more responsive to emerging issues.
“We have opportunities to amend this agreement and to work within this agreement so that things can change more quickly,” he said.
“The biggest component of it, is a more detailed tracking of how we incorporate the firefighter personnel hours, rather than just call volumes,” he said.
That extra step to track more detailed data will require additional work on an annual basis to keep the information up to date, he said.
“But once we get a process in place, it should work very seamlessly and once again, provide us that responsiveness that we need so that we can ensure the cost sharing stays equitable,” he concluded, opening the floor to questions from council.
Coun. Connie Anderson moved to approve the agreement and said he supported breaking the departments’ statistics down into specific numbers of hours put in by all of the responding members instead of simply logging just the call itself. After all, there is a big difference between a minor call that requires a response with a minimal crew, and a more serious emergency that for example results in a 12-hour response with many members involved.
Mayor Richard Warnock was pleased to see the collaboration between the municipal partners on developing the fire sub agreement.
“That’s where the ICC (Intermunicipal Collaboration Committee) really played a big part,” said Warnock.
“I do believe that our administration and their administration have come to a really good, solid agreement,” the mayor said.
Responding to a question from Coun. Owen Petersen, Nelson said the agreement had been included for discussion on county council’s agenda for the regular Feb. 28 meeting.
Among the agreement’s stated objectives are to provide both Sundre and Mountain View County residents with “more cost-effective fire services” in recognition that independently delivering fire services would present a “significantly higher” cost to both municipalities.
The agreement in part states that every year prior to Feb. 28, the town will “provide a report on the percentage of man hours that the fire service contributed to calls for service within the county in the past year.”
That figure will in turn help to determine the county’s contribution in the current year.
Small as well as major capital equipment purchases will be dealt with independently from the operating budget of the department and will be invoiced to the county as costs are incurred, net of trade-in values, grants or donation funding.
The construction of any new facilities will be addressed under a separate agreement as the need arises.
At its Feb. 28 meeting, Mountain View County council also approved the updated agreement.
The agreement is available in full on the municipality’s website by looking up the agenda package for the Feb. 26 meeting.
