Kennewick council staff to draft ordinance after presentation on reducing nuisance fire-alarm responses

Kennewick City Council workshop — Fire prevention officials on March 25 urged the council to approve an amendment to Kennewick Municipal Code (KMC) 9.48 to reduce repeated, unnecessary commercial fire-alarm responses that tie up emergency resources.

Deputy Fire Marshal Ethan Bishop said the proposal would align a nuisance-fire-alarm policy with existing KMC 9.48 procedures so the city can issue notices, track repeat activations and, after several warnings, assess civil penalties to encourage corrective maintenance. “The purpose of this proposed amendment to KMC 9.48 is in an effort to reduce the number of unnecessary responses to recurrent fire alarms deemed as a nuisance alarm,” Bishop said.

The change is intended to reduce unnecessary dispatches that, officials said, limit availability for critical emergencies and can desensitize building occupants to alarms. Bishop told the council that Kennewick Fire Department data for 2024 show 237 unintentional or system-malfunction commercial fire-alarm responses; 16 addresses generated four or more activations, and staff estimated nine addresses would have been eligible for civil penalties under the proposed rule.

Under the proposal discussed, the city would use an initial education-and-notice approach before fines. Fire crews would issue a notice of violation when they determine an activation is a nuisance; owners would have 24 hours to make an immediate correction (to avoid penalizing events that cannot be fixed at night), followed by up to two additional responses and continued education before a civil penalty is applied. Bishop described a rolling six-month window for counting nuisance activations: if a business has four nuisance activations within that six months, the civil-penalty schedule tied to KMC 9.48 would apply (fourth violation: $500; fifth: $1,000; each subsequent violation: $1,500).

Bishop said the department already reduced dispatching in 2022 by sending a single unit (nonemergency response) for alarm activations to preserve resources and limit risk during travel. Implementation steps would include training responders to identify nuisance alarms and issue notices, routing notices to the prevention division, and tracking responses and corrective actions in Tigris, the city’s inspection and maintenance tracking system. Bishop said enforcement would be a last resort intended to motivate repairs, not a revenue source.

Council members asked for additional detail before adopting the ordinance. Council Member Trumbo urged higher fines for national, absentee-owned companies that have not responded to repeated notices, saying larger, out-of-area firms may need stronger financial incentives to act. “You gotta hit them harder than $1,500,” Trumbo said, arguing that penalties must be meaningful to remote corporate owners. Bishop and others noted the difficulty of reaching remote corporate decision-makers and said changing a contractor or monitoring service is an option for owners.

Other council members counseled caution. Council Member Beecham and others supported the education-first approach and described the penalty scale as a backstop to prompt corrective maintenance; Beecham said the measure should be tracked as a pilot for a year before raising fines. Business owners on the council said one or two false alarms can have legitimate causes and favored the three-warning approach before penalties; Council Member Anderson said some businesses already see occasional fines on the police side and supported the proposed graduated schedule.

Council direction and next steps: staff said they would bring back a formal KMC amendment for adoption and include: (1) an implementation and communications plan, (2) the estimated per-response cost to the city, and (3) the typical service-call charge for alarm contractors. The council indicated general support for bringing the ordinance back at a future meeting rather than adopting it immediately; staff said they would provide a rollout timeline and success metrics for monitoring reductions in nuisance calls.

Votes at the workshop: the only formal recorded vote during the workshop was to excuse Mayor Crawford’s absence; the motion passed unanimously. No ordinance vote was taken; the council asked staff to return with the draft amendment and supporting information.

The council did not adopt changes on March 25; any change to KMC 9.48 would require council action at a future meeting.