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Linn County officials weigh mutual-aid terms as Pleasanton considers its fire department’s future
Summary
Linn County emergency management and commissioners discussed renewing mutual-aid agreements with three city fire departments, distinguishing mutual aid from automatic aid and noting a July 1 deadline if Pleasanton dissolves its department.
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 have been responding in the last three years: in 2023 Pleasanton was paged to 26 calls and responded to 4; the county responded to 20 of those calls. In 2024 Pleasanton responded to 10 calls and the county to 18; through the first part of 2025 Pleasanton had run 6 calls and the county 10. Higwell said those figures reflect changes in dispatch SOGs and cancellations when responding crews are not needed.
Higwell and the commissioners drew a clear distinction between automatic aid—where the county would be paged to almost all calls in a town—and mutual aid, which can be tailored in writing to specify which types of incidents trigger a county response. “Automatic aid is we’re running their fire department…no matter what they get paged to, we’re getting paged,” Higwell said. “With the mutual-aid agreement, you can tailor it to fit what you need.”
Mayor Matthew Young of Pleasanton, who attended the meeting, told commissioners Pleasanton requested information about what responding county crews cost because city residents asked why county crews were answering many calls. “If the county’s the only one responding, then we feel that that’s just not appropriate,” Young said. He requested copies of the dispatch SOGs and other documentation to inform Pleasanton’s council discussion.
Commissioners and staff discussed deadlines tied to state budget and tax cycles if Pleasanton chooses to dissolve its department. Higwell advised that Pleasanton would need to formally ask the county to absorb the area into the Linn County Rural Fire District before July 1 to allow the district to take effect Jan. 1, 2026; if the city delayed until after that date, an absorption would take effect Jan. 1, 2027 because of budget and tax calendar rules. Higwell described that timetable as tied to tax and budget cycles rather than county discretion.
No formal action to approve either an automatic-aid or mutual-aid agreement was taken at the May 12 meeting. Commissioners directed staff to continue negotiations and to bring the draft mutual-aid agreements back to the board after the cities provide feedback; they also scheduled a follow-up legal review and asked staff to send copies of the dispatch SOGs and statute references to the affected cities.
The discussion also noted potential operational and financial steps the county could take, including inserting billing provisions in aid agreements that would allow the county to recover costs if a municipality declined to respond and the county covered the call. Higwell said the state mutual-aid statute (referenced in the discussion) allows for mutual support but does not itself impose billing requirements.
The commissioners said they would discuss the differences between automatic aid and mutual aid in a legal work session soon and asked staff to return with proposed language and deadlines for the cities to respond.
Ending: The board did not adopt any agreement at the meeting; commissioners asked staff to return the draft mutual-aid agreements and legal analysis for formal action once the cities reply and to continue coordinating with Pleasanton officials on the July 1 timetable.
