The St. Paul Fire Department will be ending a five-year automatic aid agreement with Ramsey County fire departments, saying adjacent towns have become too dependent on St. Paul’s resources.

The agreement stipulated that the nearest agency to an emergency would respond regardless of jurisdiction. But it’s not in the city’s best interest, according to Fire Chief Butch Inks, because those fire calls go uncompensated.

“While the City of St. Paul and the St. Paul Fire Department are concerned for the safety of all residents, we believe that the city is bearing a disproportionate burden for fire services in Ramsey County,” Inks wrote in a Jan. 22 letter addressed to Ramsey County Fire Chiefs.

The termination goes into effect mid-March.

RAMSEY COUNTY CHIEFS ‘DISAPPOINTED’ WITH DECISION

Neighboring fire departments were surprised to get the letter and contested the idea that St. Paul, which has 15 stations and responds to over 50,000 runs a year, is doing all the heavy lifting.

“The closest unit dispatch collaboration has been working well for all cities involved and will continue to serve the needs for all remaining cities,” said Maplewood Public Safety Director Scott Nadeau. “It is disappointing that one of the partners did not see the value of this collaborative effort.”

Roseville’s fire department also described the decision as “disappointing” but declined to comment further.

AN AWARD-WINNING IDEA

The “closest unit dispatch” contract is officially called the “Mutual Aid Agreement to Provide for the Automatic Dispatch of the Closest Emergency Response Unit Regardless of Jurisdictional Boundaries Joint Powers Agreement.”

It was activated in 2015 when Ramsey County emergency vehicles were outfitted with Automatic Vehicle Location technology as part of a $9.5 million overhaul of the county’s computer-aided dispatch, the backbone of the 911 answering and dispatching system.

The technology would help decrease response times by allowing dispatchers to locate the emergency vehicle closest to the incident regardless of jurisdiction.

Before that, fire departments would wait for the local department to respond to the emergency and realize they needed help. That department would send out a call for mutual aid and the nearest departments would be dispatched.

The “closest unit dispatch” contract doesn’t wait for a mutual aid call. If St. Paul’s trucks are closest to Roseville’s fire, they are immediately dispatched. Roseville also would respond, but St. Paul would likely get there first.

The program was honored in 2018 when the Ramsey County Fire Chiefs Association received a Local Government Innovation Award from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

‘THEY ASSUME ST. PAUL WILL COVER THEM’

But St. Paul soured on the deal when it felt like their department was being overused.

Inks, who was not chief when the original agreement was put in place, cited three incidents that caused him to want to take a closer look at the contract.

St. Paul firefighters responded to a bus crash in Falcon Heights on the first day of the Minnesota State Fair last year which hospitalized eight and injured 24.

“St. Paul sent multiple resources, ambulances, firefighters, chief officers,” Inks said. “Falcon Height’s contribution was one guy in his private car with his infant baby in the car.”

The second incident was a Falcon Heights City Council meeting in December in which the city entered a one-year $40,000 contract with Roseville to act as its fire department. The move came after Falcon Heights had fired its fire chief, and over concerns of lack of coverage of the bus crash.

“Roseville gets compensated to get fire services to Falcon Heights,” Inks said. “They (Roseville) admit they don’t have enough people, but they took on another community. They’re making these decisions because they assume St. Paul will cover them.”

Roseville and Maplewood are in the process of phasing out part-time firefighters for a full-time crew. In Roseville’s case, the part-timers were quitting faster than the budget allowed to hire new full-timers, causing staff shortage concerns.

Third, St. Paul firefighters were called to a basement fire in Maplewood in January.

“We were the first ones on scene,” he said. “It took over five minutes for Maplewood to arrive. When they did arrive, they had only two people on their apparatus, well below the national standards. That compromises the safety of my people.”

CONTRACT COMPROMISES ST. PAUL

Inks said the letter is meant to be a conversation starter between the Ramsey County fire chiefs, not a money grab or a refusal to help.

“It took me to do this to get everyone in a room to say let’s talk about it,” he said. He hopes to have a meeting with the other Ramsey County fire chiefs in the near future to renegotiate the contracts.

Inks said he did not have figures on how many calls the department responds to outside the city and did not specify exactly what he’d like to do differently, other than have St. Paul compensated for the calls. He added that the city has asked the department to trim its budget, so he’s concerned about having enough resources to cover St. Paul.

“My role is to serve the residents of St. Paul and the firefighters in St. Paul,” he said. “Any time we send resources to other communities, the service to St. Paul residents is compromised. This letter simply says I want to have further conversations about how this should work. We believe that every resident’s life and everybody’s safety is important. But the way that this agreement is written compromises St. Paul.”

WHAT DOES MINNEAPOLIS DO?

Minneapolis doesn’t do automatic aid anymore, said Minneapolis Assistant Chief Bryan Tyner.

“We recently ended our auto-aid agreement with Richfield,” he said. “We actually have a mutual aid agreement with them now. We do not receive any reimbursement for services.”

Inks said the change may prompt the other cities to invest more in their fire departments, something Maplewood feels it’s already doing.