County officials say they hope to schedule another fire and rescue "summit" meeting sometime this spring to address concerns raised during a county-wide meeting of township and emergency services leaders in November 2007.

Although county officials announced at the end of the Nov. 29 “summit” meeting that another meeting would be held in January 2008, months have come and gone since then without any followup meeting.

Meanwhile, one of the common themes that emerged from Annual Meetings held in most Leelanau County townships in March was an increasing concern about how to pay for fire and rescue services provided by the various departments that cover the county. In many townships, taxpayers will be asked to approve new millage proposals to pay for local fire and rescue services in the future – and some township boards are being forced to dip into reserve funds to pay for fire and rescue services this fiscal year.

At the November 2007 summit, a number of officials suggested that local governments operating fire and rescue departments could reduce costs by collaborating more closely with each other – particularly when it comes to providing increasingly sophisticated “Advanced Life Support” ambulance service on a 24/7 basis to residents and taxpayers who have come to expect such service. For most of the county’s fire and rescue departments, the number of ambulance runs is far greater than the number of fire runs.

The first countywide meeting in recent memory to discuss fire and rescue issues, held Nov. 29, was an outgrowth of an “Intergovernmental Cooperation Summit” hosted by the county on Sept. 5, 2007, during which several groups were formed to consider ways local units of government can work together more effectively. The need for better collaboration in the area of fire and rescue emerged as the number one issue at the Sept. 5 meeting.

At the conclusion of the “fire summit,” officials agreed to meet in January to hear from experts on the various “quality standards” that can be applied to fire and rescue departments – for example, detailed definitions of “Advanced Life Support” and “Basic Life Support” as well as response time expectations. At the time, county administrator David Gill said he would work with county Emergency Services director Tom Skowronski to pull together data that would be studied by participants at a January meeting. Plans called for the same Michigan State University Extension expert who facilitated the Nov. 29 meeting, John Amrhein, to facilitate the January meeting.

Gill said last week that although he’d been in touch with Amrhein since November, the two had encountered delays in identifying and scheduling individuals qualified and available to speak at a followup summit. Gill also noted that, during January through March of this year, most county officials were absorbed in the process of moving the county seat from Leland into the new Government Center in Suttons Bay Township – and plans to host another fire and rescue “summit” went on the back burner.

“We’re now looking at possibly holding it sometime in April or May,” Gill said. “If it’s going to happen, somebody will have to facilitate it on a county-wide basis. But our only stake in it, as a county, is to facilitate the process – and we’re only doing that because the townships asked us to.”

Bingham Township trustee Mary Bush also serves on the board of the Suttons Bay-Bingham Fire and Rescue Authority. She said she thought the November 2007 summit was excellent, and was looking forward to a follow-up meeting.

“It’s not that I wanted to add yet another meeting to my list,” Bush said. “But it’s very important that we have a forum in which we can see if some of the fire and rescue departments in Leelanau County have some similar goals they can work towards together.”

Currently, some of the goals appear to be diverging. In Kasson Township, for example, about one fifth of the township has received fire and rescue coverage from the Empire Fire Department, with the remainder coming from the Solon-Centerville (Cedar) Fire Department. But Empire recently joined forces with Glen Arbor to form Glen Lake Fire and Rescue whose fulltime professionals will provide 24/7 Advanced Life Support (ALS) ambulance service within its coverage area – including a portion of Kasson Township – at a considerably higher cost than the “Basic Life Support” ambulance service provided mostly by part-time volunteers. The result will be that, in one township, residents will receive substantially different levels of ambulance service, requiring substantially different levels of financial support from taxpayers.

In December of last year, the Glen Arbor (Glen Lake) Fire and Rescue Department ceased sending its full-time, professional staff into the Solon-Centerville Fire and Rescue Department’s area of responsibility. The change came as the result of a disparity between the abilities of the two departments to support each other. Unlike Glen Lake, Solon-Centerville has one of the lowest operating budgets in the county and, until relatively recently, employed only one “full-time equivalent” professional on staff.

Meanwhile, Suttons Bay-Bingham – which also provides 24/7 ALS – has struggled to maintain contracts to provide the service to neighboring Leelanau Township, and last year lost its contract with another neighbor, Leland Township, which opted instead to contract with Northflight Emergency Services in Traverse City.

“Everybody has these same problems all over the state,” said Solon-Centerville fire chief Albin Rosinski. “The training regulations, licensing requirements and a whole host of things are making it more expensive and difficult to operate fire and rescue departments,” Rosinski said.

(Editor’s Note: Detailed stories on Annual Meetings held Saturday in six of Leelanau County’s 11 townships, including news of local fire and rescue issues, are contained in Section 2 of this edition.)