Fire chief seeks First Due software to meet new national reporting standard; county cost share discussed

Fire Chief Ryan O’Hearn told the Pocatello City Council work session the department must replace legacy reporting tools to comply with an upgraded national incident reporting standard and proposed contracting with First Due for a consolidated software platform.

O’Hearn said the older National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) is being replaced by a broader National Emergency Response Information System and that the region’s scheduled transition starts in October; reporting to the legacy system will end Jan. 1, 2026. “The system that we’re currently using is not going to be compliant with new standards, and so that necessitates a new fire incident reporting system,” O’Hearn said.

The department currently uses multiple separate platforms for functions such as scheduling, patient care reporting, training, fire investigations and pre‑incident planning; that causes duplicate data entry and requires custom APIs to share data. O’Hearn said First Due was selected after review because it offers single sign‑on, cross‑module data sharing, incident management, personnel tracking on‑scene, and asset management for protective equipment.

Budget and implementation

O’Hearn said the FY25 operating budget for multiple platforms is just over $53,000; the First Due subscription would be about $52,000 in FY26, producing an estimated annual savings of roughly $1,400. He reported an upfront implementation cost of about $24,000 that would include a quarter of subscription access (July–September) to run both systems concurrently for training and data migration; the chief also described an additional training and data‑migration fee during the presentation.

The chief said the city plans to split ongoing costs with Bannock County (50/50) and that the county would also share implementation costs. Council members asked whether the county had committed funding; O’Hearn said the city will bring a contract to the council in July and manage operating‑line adjustments in the FY25 budget, and he offered to notify county partners.

Operational questions and integration

Council members asked about integration with the county’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system and whether First Due would feed data back to CAD. O’Hearn said CAD will provide call information to First Due, but First Due will not write back into the CAD system for security reasons. Council members also confirmed the contract contains an annual cap on price increases (chief said there is a 5% annual limit).

Next steps

O’Hearn said staff will prepare the contract with First Due and bring it to a regular council meeting for execution, likely in July. He and council members stressed the transition is mandatory; the chief said readiness and data migration are the immediate priorities.

Ending

Council members indicated support for proceeding to contract review. Staff will finalize contract language, coordinate with county partners on cost sharing, and return with the contract for formal council action.