Bremerton should decide next move on RFA, SKFR says

Published 2:33 pm Thursday, June 11, 2009

The South Kitsap Fire and Rescue Board of Commissioners voted last week that the next best step in merging three local fire departments would be to have the Bremerton Fire Department decide which one agency it would like to join forces with.

“They are the agency in the middle,” said SKFR Deputy Chief Steve Wright, addressing the board at its latest meeting May 28. “It makes sense for them to make a decision about which way they want to go.

Wright and the commissioners were discussing the four options that had recently been identified for continuing with a potential merger between SKFR, BFD and Central Kitsap Fire and Rescue.

In April, the planning committee for West Sound Fire and Rescue — the name of the potential agency that all three agencies would have merged into — decided that there would not be enough time to hammer out all issues surrounding such a venture before the election in November.

With the merger not going before voters this year, the departments are still trying to determine what other progress can and should be made toward an eventual merger.

Four options were identified, which Wright presented to the SKFR board:

• All three agencies continue working toward a three-way merger into West Sound Fire and Rescue

• Merge two of the current departments into a RFA with the intent of adding the third at some point in the future.

• Consolidate some operations in order to prove efficiencies are possible and already working. (SKFR and BFD have cooperated for some time on Drop Borders Now, an agreement that has the closest agency responding to certain incidents though they may officially be in the other’s jurisdiction).

• Have BFD annex into either SKFR or CKFR.

Drawbacks for merging two agencies first instead of all three were identified, including the fact that it would not “allow all three departments to contribute equally to the formation and character” of the RFA, but the committee also suggested that merging two agencies first may “reduce the number of obstacles … in the short term, thereby aiding in the initial formation of a RFA.”

Commissioners Dusty Wiley and Gerald Preuss agreed that the best option would be to have BFD decide which agency to merge with, and the eventual goal still be to have a three-way merger.

“Of course, Bremerton could decide to stay where they are,” Wiley added.

“But this gives us something to work with and plan for,” Wright said. “That way Chief (Wayne Senter) knows what direction we want to go in.”

At the planning committee’s meeting April 22, Wiley said Bremerton Fire Chief Al Duke, who serves on the WSFR’s steering committee, presented a recommendation to slow down the process and not put it before the votes in November.

“There was just too much to get done by November,” Wiley said at a SKFR board meeting the following day, explaining that figuring out a way to combine the three very different funding mechanisms that the agencies operate under was difficult enough, but seemed nearly impossible when faced with a faltering economy.

“With the concerns about the economy and overall funding issues, the committee passed a motion to not have the issue on the ballot this November,” Wright said. At the next meeting of WSFR’s planning committee May 19, the four options described above were discussed.

The idea for a merger was supported by the Kitsap Cooperative Services Feasibility Study prepared by Emergency Services Consulting inc.(ESCi) for all three fire agencies.

While the study suggested there could be benefits to the three organizations not officially “merging” into one organization yet agreeing to cooperatively deliver services, ESCi ultimately recommended a full integration as a “regional fire authority” as the preferred option.

According to the report, the three departments are often duplicating each other’s efforts, particularly in administrative and support services, and a “full legal integration (into) a single fire agency,” would result in an overall savings to each agency as it “eliminates redundancies while improving the overall level of service.”