When the Jefferson County Capital Improvements Plan is completed by early 2020, it will include an item some officials believe will be unique: a fire protection needs assessment.
“I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this type of fire needs assessment has been done before at the county level anywhere in Montana, let alone within Jefferson County itself,” Doug Dodge, the county’s Disaster and Emergency Services coordinator, said by email. “What we are doing isn’t, as far as I know, a common component of a county-level CIP.”
The capital improvements plan will let the commission prioritize maintenance, repair and improvements of infrastructure and equipment and to identify funding for such projects. It will also help ensure that consistent decisions are made as staff and elected officials change and is meant to be reviewed annually and revised as needed.
“The fire protection assessment is a more intense review than would typically be included in a Capital Improvements Plan,” explained Jefferson County Planer LaDana Hintz. “Many of our fire departments don’t have the capability to perform this type of assessment, but it is a significant piece of data that will help with future planning and is long overdue.”
According to Bruce Suenram of Fire Logistics, the Hamilton-based consultant hired to do the fire protection needs assessment, its purpose is to examine capital needs in Jefferson County’s fire agencies, water supplies, roads and access, and vegetation management.
“The projected costs of [those needs] — a new fire station, fire engine, or water supply, for example — will be incorporated into the [CIP] and hopefully budgeted for at the time when needed,” Suenram wrote.
“We have done several strategic plans for departments and assessments of a single agency,” Suenram said by email. “As far as I know, this is the first time a Board of County Commissioners has decided to complete an assessment of the fire protection system in the county.”
According to Dodge, in doing the assessment the county is “trying to be more comprehensive and strategic than what may be possible at [only] the fire district/fire service area level.”
“By looking at it from a countywide perspective, we hope to be able to find and leverage planning tools and other solutions that individual departments don’t necessarily have available to solve some long-standing problems,” he wrote.
Hintz said that the fire protection needs assessment is one of a handful of linked items needed to update the county’s growth policy, a process she said has taken about three years.
In addition to informing the CIP — what Hintz referred to as “an implementation tool of the growth policy” — the fire protection needs assessment will help update the county’s subdivision regulations for the first time since about 1996, she said.
“We need to update the subdivision regulations, but we need to be able to justify the regulations,” Hintz said. “So we need the fire piece to be able to justify impact fees or infrastructure or whatever. That’s why this fire protection piece was so important: to be able to pull it in there to tie everything together, so we can work on getting the growth policy finished.”
Hintz added that the fire protection needs assessment would also inform any future updating of the county’s zoning regulations.
Originally, the county planned for the CIP to contain a section on fire needs “at a small scale,” Hintz said.
“Then when we saw, ‘Oh, we really need this [assessment] piece to do the other stuff’ … that’s where the project grew from,” she said.
In a letter dated May 14 and addressed to the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners, Lyn Stimpson, Montana City Fire District Chief and then president-elect of the Jefferson County Rural Fire Council, “strongly” encouraged it to support the assessment.
“The continued residential and commercial growth in Jefferson County means we need an outside expert to evaluate issues related to current fire protection, water supply and fire/emergency risks,” Stimpson wrote. “The assessment will give our Fire Department, and all the Fire Departments of the Jefferson County Rural Fire Council a way to set goals and plan for the future public safety needs of our citizens.”
The commissioners showed their agreement June 4 by voting 3-0 to pay up to $20,000 for the assessment. That amount was added to the $66,667 they previously approved paying Great West Engineering to author the CIP. Great West Engineering in turn contracted with Suenram to produce the fire protection needs component.
“We live in a county that is exploding in residential growth and a lot of that growth is within the wildland-urban interface,” Commissioner Cory Kirsch — also the chief of Bull Mountain Volunteer Fire Department — said by email. “As we update these important planning documents, I feel it is very important that we include this fire information to help steer this development in a safe and educated direction. Our planning board uses the subdivision regulations to make recommendations to the commission about almost every aspect of each subdivision in the county. Without some kind of fire related policy in these regulations, we have no way to assess the risks this new development may have related to fire.”
The fire protection needs assessment was kicked off Jan. 17. That day, Hintz convened various stakeholders for a tour primarily of subdivisions and other residential areas from Montana City to Jefferson City, as well as the I-15 corridor and the Boulder area.
According to the day’s agenda, organizers chose the sites to provide “a broad look at the conditions present” — such as “stations, water supplies, development, forest issues, etc.” — in various locations throughout the county.
The group also looked at the health of the area’s forests.
The tour was also an opportunity to identify and assess potential locations where the county might establish Rural Improvement Districts or Rural Maintenance Districts — mechanisms for funding, in this case, “new water supplies or to maintain existing ones and to help site locations for new facilities,” according to an email from Hintz.
Separate from the fire protection needs assessment but still useful to county planning, the RID/RFD study is being conducted by Land Solutions under contract to Headwaters Economics and at no cost to the county.
Although separate projects, Hintz said the Headwaters study and the fire protection needs assessment might share data, and the Headwaters project “will be a future funding mechanism that the [fire protection needs assessment] may reference if it has a goals/objectives section.”
As part of the assessment, Hintz said that she and Dodge want to map the entire county’s water supplies or “potential dip sites” — ponds, lakes or rivers where fire trucks or helicopters can reload.
“Currently we have some areas mapped, but some of that data seems outdated and most of the county is not mapped,” Hintz said by email.
Mapping those sources will assist dispatchers and with fire department, county and subdivision planning, she wrote.
Suenram estimated that the fire protection needs assessment “will be valid for 3 to 5 years depending on the finances of the respective entities.”
