Linn County officials weigh mutual-aid terms as Pleasanton considers its fire department’s future

Linn County emergency management officials and the county commissioners spent more than an hour on May 12 discussing mutual-aid and automatic-aid relationships with the county’s three municipal fire departments as Pleasanton’s city council considers whether to keep its fire department.

Randy Higwell, Linn County emergency management, told the Linn County Board of County Commissioners that automatic-aid agreements that had expired in 2018 have been replaced in draft form by mutual-aid agreements the county sent to the three cities—Pleasanton, Lacine and Lynn Valley—for review. He said the county is responding to calls in the towns when paged and that dispatch standard operating guidelines (SOGs) currently page the three closest stations for structure fires regardless of municipal boundaries.

“Since automatic aid expired in 02/2018…we started working on automatic and mutual aid agreements,” Higwell said, describing drafts he said the cities are reviewing. He briefed commissioners on response tallies to show how often county crews…