Planners review Bonner County GIS fire-response map; fire chief warns against public release

Planners with the Bonner County Planning Commission on July 15 reviewed a GIS analysis that maps drive-time from local fire stations; Bonner County staff member Michael Bowling demonstrated a color-coded map while Northside Fire District Chief Jeff Armstrong and other fire officials cautioned the commission about the map's limitations.

The map, shown by Michael Bowling, used the county road network to estimate time-from-station drive times in six color bands (green 0–5 minutes; yellow 5–10; orange 10–15; red 15–20; purple 20–25; maroon 25–30; beyond maroon = >30 minutes). Bowling told commissioners the map currently lives on his local machine but could be placed in the county app; he said drive-time estimates generally matched Google on paved roads within about 30 seconds and were within a minute or two on gravel and mountain roads, and that private minor roads are currently modeled at a 25 mph limit, which likely underestimates travel time.

Chief Jeff Armstrong said the technical approach risked misleading policymakers and the public because “drive time is not response time.” He urged commissioners not to publish the map in its present form. “Those fire stations that you have indicated are not staffed. We also don't have equipment in some of them,” Armstrong said, adding that true response time must account for turnout time (how long it takes personnel to get aboard apparatus) and volunteer travel time to the station.

Why this matters: planners are considering whether distance or response-time information should influence future zoning or density limits in rural areas. Several fire-district officials told the commission that reliance on a drive-time layer alone could understate risk to remote properties and to mutual-aid dynamics when engines must be backfilled from neighboring districts.

Bowling described the current technical limits and possible fixes: he said the model uses posted speed limits and county road geometry and that private minor roads were assigned a 25-mph travel speed for modeling. He offered to add the map to the commission’s app as soon as the following week if the commission wanted it available internally, but he said he was reluctant to publish it to the public without refinement. He also said his system can produce heat maps of call frequency and can import dispatch/records-management data if the county or fire districts provide it.

Armstrong recommended several concrete improvements before any public release or reliance for land-use decisions: remove stations that do not have equipment, add a staffing layer (turn staff stations on/off), incorporate turnout time and volunteer mobilization delays, and incorporate real response-time records from the new records-management system. He said the county holds the enterprise Esri (ArcGIS) account and that, with proper permissions, districts could access the county’s GIS resources or request the county to add layers on their behalf.

Dave Bowman, who identified himself in public comment, emphasized mutual-aid and backfill effects: “When we respond to a call… the first engine out is going to come out of Northside, but then it's also going to be followed by an engine probably from Sagle and another one from Sandpoint, which then leaves a gap in those areas.” Bowman asked that the model reflect how a dispatch pulls resources from multiple districts rather than only the nearest station.

Planning commissioners and staff asked how the map might be used in future zoning or comprehensive-plan criteria. Commissioners said a refined map could inform where higher rural densities should be allowed or curtailed, but they agreed with chief and other speakers that the map in its present form should not be published or treated as a precise measure of emergency-service capability.

The Road and Bridge director (unnamed in the record) and other county service providers joined the later discussion of infrastructure more broadly. Road and Bridge staff said county road maintenance, chip-seal budgets and response resources place limits on how much rural road capacity the county can sustain; they noted the county can maintain a finite mileage of improved surfacing and that adding more subdivisions increases maintenance and safety demands.

What the commission directed: staff will continue to refine the GIS map in collaboration with fire districts. Specific next steps noted in the meeting record include: removing stations without equipment from the map layers, creating distinct staffing/equipment layers, adding heat-map layers from dispatch/incident records if districts grant data access, and continuing coordination with all county fire districts before any public release or use of the map in code or zoning guidance.

The meeting record shows planning staff will reach out to fire-district chiefs to gather staffing and equipment inventories and to discuss sharing Esri data. Commissioners asked staff to return with an updated map and said they would treat the current product as a preliminary planning tool only.

Ending — what to expect next: Planning staff said they can incorporate a refined map into the commission’s app for internal use; the commission and fire chiefs agreed to press for better incident data from the records-management system and to hold follow-up technical sessions to define how (and whether) any response-time or staffing layers should be reflected in future land-use rules.