Committee approves mutual-aid agreement enabling Fairfax County to handle calls in disaster recovery

The Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County Public Health & Safety Committee approved a resolution authorizing an intergovernmental mutual‑aid agreement that would allow Fairfax County, Virginia, to handle certain Metro emergency communications calls in a disaster‑recovery scenario.

The committee voted to approve RS 20 25‑1009 after passing a housekeeping substitute to align party names; the substitute and the final motion passed on unanimous committee votes. The measure authorizes a reciprocal agreement between the Metropolitan Department of Emergency Communications and the Fairfax County Department of Public Safety Communications for use only when local systems cannot accept or route calls.

Why it matters: The agreement is intended as an emergency redundancy so 911 and nonemergency calls can be answered if local infrastructure is offline. Committee members pressed department staff about triggers, staffing and training so callers routed to another jurisdiction receive accurate location information and timely dispatch.

Steven Martini, director of the Department of Emergency Communications, told the committee: “In each of these situations, these are disaster recovery solutions only.” Martini said routing to another jurisdiction would occur only after Metro exhausted methods to connect a caller to a Davidson County dispatcher.

Martini defined the scope of activation as “immediate and total critical infrastructure failure,” saying the mechanism is intended only for extreme outages. He described an existing bilateral arrangement with Williamson County for nonemergency calls and said the Fairfax agreement is the first involving another 911 center that would take calls with greater geographic separation.

Council members asked about reciprocity, staffing and potential broader pairings with distant jurisdictions to avoid simultaneous regional outages. Martini said the agreement is two‑way and that Metro is exploring additional partners; he also described planned training exchanges for tactical incident dispatch teams so out‑of‑area dispatchers can use common, plain‑language protocols and shared mapping resources.

The committee recorded the substitute vote as 10 in favor, 0 against, 0 not voting, and later voted on the amended resolution with the same tally, recommending approval.

The measure requires no change to Metro staffing levels and, per Martini, does not alter local dispatch operations outside of declared disasters. The resolution will return to the full council for final action.