Keach: Not So Mutual Aid For The City Of Concord

CONCORD, NH — The Capital Area Mutual Aid Fire Compact is comprised of 24 fire departments in the surrounding cities and towns around Concord.

The compact was originally conceived as a method to provide support and aid to other member communities during major incidents. The concept was to share emergency resources with each other when needed.

The concept makes sense. No community, including Concord, has the necessary resources for a major incident such as a 3rd alarm fire. The pooling of regional emergency resources makes perfect public safety sense.

However, in recent years the “mutual” part of mutual aid has become inequitable to Concord.

Increasingly, Concord is called upon in an inequitable way in providing emergency services to surrounding communities. This is the case both in fire suppression and emergency medical services. Smaller communities surrounding Concord are either all volunteer or a combination of volunteer and partially staffed model.

As these smaller communities around Concord have grown, they have not kept pace with adequate funding and staffing for this surge of emergency service demands. Increasingly Concord has become the default in providing this coverage.

Unfortunately, this means that Concord taxpayers are subsidizing these town’s emergency services. And beyond the economic inequity of this arrangement, Concord citizens are being put at risk as their fighter fighters and EMS personal are unavailable for Concord’s needs.

Take as an example a recent over night fire in Chichester. A request went out to Concord for mutual aid for a building fire. Concord responded with Engine 7, Ambulance 7, Tower 1, Ambulance 1 and the Battalion Chief. Around 5 million dollars of equipment and 11 firefighters answered the call.

This left 10 of the 21 firefighters on duty that night remaining in Concord.

The smaller towns around Concord increasingly find themselves struggling to fill the volunteer positions. These towns also struggle to adequately fund their fire department budgets in order to purchase and maintain very expensive fire apparatus.

The time has come that the practical and financial model for this mutual aid compact to be analyzed and made more equitable for Concord taxpayers. Ideally, the compact would emulate some type of regional approach towards funding. A per capita cost sharing for each of the participating communities could work.

We all want public safety. It is difficult to assign a dollar value to human life and safety, but Concord cannot continue in this direction of subsidizing our neighbor’s public safety responsibilities. The mutual aid must be mutual.

Fred B. Keach is an At-Large City Council in Concord.