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Buouie reviews MOU for incident support team that supplies comms, lighting and power to incidents
Summary
The city's Office of Emergency Management presented a memorandum of understanding for an Incident Support Team that provides radio communications and power generation for incident command posts; the plan covers the first 12 hours as city‑funded and relies on updated mutual-aid language to secure potential FEMA reimbursement.
Kirk, representing the City of Buouie's Office of Emergency Management, presented a draft memorandum of understanding (MOU) that would formalize the Incident Support Team's role in responding to local emergencies.
Kirk said the team provides specialized services—radio communications, electrical power generation and lighting—to support incident command posts. He noted deployments to several recent responses, including a 700-acre grass fire, a drowning at Lake Amon Carter and a tornado response in Forestburg, and said the field deployments have helped staff fine-tune the trailer-mounted equipment.
Kirk explained the program's reimbursement logic and why the MOU language must be explicit: “The first 12 hours of a deployment that's on us, the city of Buouie, we'll pay for the personnel, we'll pay for the equipment, the fuel, everything else,” he said. By 12 hours, Kirk said, the scale of an incident should be known; if the event becomes eligible for a Fire Management Assistance Grant or FEMA public-assistance funding, the requesting agency can include the city's invoice in its grant submission and the city will be reimbursed. If not, the requesting agency would be expected to cover expenses beyond the first 12 hours.
Council members asked whether deployments are mainly fires and whether the deployed personnel remain under local command. Kirk said fires are common but the team has deployed to tornado and drowning responses; he said he is currently the primary deployable employee and that trained volunteers assist. The council discussed volunteer liability and noted that mutual-aid agreements drafted by Nortex predate current FEMA grant requirements and may need update.
Kirk said the city intends to distribute the MOU to interested agencies across Monte County for signature, and to review it annually with a fuller update every five years or as needed. The council will have an opportunity to approve returning agreements once partner jurisdictions route them back to the city.
What happens next: staff will circulate mutual-aid and MOU language to partner jurisdictions and return updated agreements to council for approval; staff also flagged the need to address volunteer liability language in the MOU.
Representative quote: “By the end of 12 hours, you should know how big is big and bad is bad,” Kirk said, describing the operational threshold for invoicing and mutual-aid activation.
