Deputy Chief Keith DeBaco presented the Hagerstown Fire Department's operations and urged the council not to curtail automatic aid without careful planning, saying the department has 79 funded career positions and operates out of five stations with a minimum of 16 personnel on duty each day. He stressed the city generally staffs two firefighters per unit, below the national recommendation of four per apparatus, and warned that removing automatic responses could raise public-safety risk near irregular city boundaries.

Council members focused on the long-standing concern that city taxpayers subsidize services that also benefit county residents. An elected official (Unidentified Speaker 8) argued the 2020 MOU was implemented in part to blunt the city's political case for a tax differential and called for either renegotiation or compensation: "This conversation about tax differential didn't just pop up 6 months ago," the council member said, adding that the city provides policing and fire services at scale that the county would otherwise have to fund.

Staff reviewed the MOU's operational terms: the agreement (signed 01/16/2020) limits automatic aid so no agency sends more than 50% of resources outside its boundaries and states Hagerstown will not send more than two engines, one truck and one battalion chief for automatic aid. DeBaco pointed to two years of incident data (11/01/2023–11/01/2025): the department responded to 8,969 calls, 85% of them inside city limits and 1,363 outside the city (15%). He noted that when Hagerstown responds outside the city it is most often a single-unit response (62% of out-of-city calls) and that full four-unit MOU responses were rare (48 calls in two years).

City and county funding differences surfaced repeatedly: staff described county contributions that benefit Hagerstown (equipment testing, EMS supplies, portable radios and approximately $78,000 per year in Senator Amos funds that go to the city), but noted the city does not receive the county's $25,000 staffing payment that many county volunteer stations get. City leaders and staff discussed short-term remedies (seeking reimbursement for fuel and maintenance or routing staffing funds to the Hagerstown Fire Department) and longer-term options (renegotiating the MOU and creating more frequent reviews)."There's room for improvement and there's been a lot of discussion about the tax differential," DeBaco said, but he urged caution about reducing response levels: "I would not be in favor of reducing response for safety."

Next steps: council members suggested instructing city staff to open a renegotiation or review process with the county that could include annual reviews and specific reimbursement asks (fuel/maintenance/staffing) before the next budget cycle. No formal MOU change or vote occurred at the work session.