Jasper County leaders weigh creating defined fire service areas and hiring neutral consultant

Officials from Jasper County and neighboring municipalities met in a joint workshop to consider creating defined fire service areas intended to reduce overlapping emergency responses, make service costs more transparent and improve response times.

Josh Blue, the staff presenter, said the discussion grew out of growth and call‑volume trends: "The population of Jasper County has grown by about 29 and a half percent over the last 10 years," he told the joint bodies, linking population growth to increased emergency medical and fire calls.

County fire leadership walked through the underlying data and methods. Chief Wells described how incident and dispatch records were exported from the Motorola Flex CAD and records‑management system, processed through Crystal Reports and pivot tables, and used to produce heat maps and drive‑time analyses showing where municipal stations regularly respond into unincorporated areas. "Our recommendation ... we feel it is prudent and necessary to consider a consultant," Wells said, urging a neutral third party to reconcile technical data, operational needs and financial impacts.

Philip Cochran, the communications manager and CAD super‑user, summarized how dispatch decisions are made from geographic layers in the CAD and explained that automatic vehicle location (AVL) and other AVL‑style enhancements would improve accuracy but require hardware and software investments. "All agencies within Jasper County are dispatched out of the consolidated PSAP," Cochran said.

Elected officials pressed several recurring concerns: whether any reconfiguration would result in job losses (staff repeatedly assured it would not), how costs and millage would be allocated, and whether the county and municipalities should first agree on draft service‑area boundaries before hiring consultants. "That is not what we are trying to do," Josh Blue said in response to staff fears about workforce impacts.

Municipal representatives offered draft maps showing municipal growth boundaries and argued some purple‑shaded county areas could be absorbed by nearby city stations within a roughly five‑mile response radius, while county officials warned that some rural zones remain understaffed and would need targeted resources.

The governing bodies did not take formal votes at the workshop. Staff and the chiefs said draft service‑area maps already exist and can be shared; they were asked to circulate three jurisdictional maps and a proposed consultant scope and cost estimate by mid‑January so elected leaders could consider funding in the coming budget cycle. Officials discussed aiming for implementation planning in time for next summerbudget adoption if the councils approve the work.

Next steps identified at the meeting included sharing the draft maps with all parties, pursuing immediate low‑cost operational changes such as dispatch‑protocol tweaks or small CAD tests, and returning with a defined consultant scope and budget estimate for elected review.