FRESNO COUNTY – Momentum is heating up in efforts to enhance the quality of emergency service response provided by the Fresno County Fire Protection District.
The Fresno County Board of Supervisors on Aug. 25 received and filed a nearly 300-page evaluation of the Fresno County Fire Protection District’s emergency response and operational performance. Although no formal action was needed, the board directed staff to work with FCFPD on an item supervisors can act upon that would allow the district to begin implementing some of the report’s recommendations.
County Administrative Officer Paul Nerland told the board about early conversations he had with FCFPD Chief Dustin Hail about what level of fire protection they wanted to see in Fresno County. While that’s an easy question for residents living with wildfire risk to answer, Nerland said, he and Hail realized they need to look at the question on a broader scale and assess if the district is positioned to serve the community well both now and in the future.
“I think as you read this report, you’ll say the answer is both encouraging with the partnerships that we have with our partners in not just our fire district, but our volunteer departments and so forth, but also there’s some challenges,” Nerland said.
The report, put together by consultants AP Triton, is called a Community Risk Assessment and Standards of Cover (CRA-SOC) Deployment Analysis. A CRA-SOC helps fire departments with master planning by providing clear data on community risks and department performance, leading to specific recommendations for staffing levels and organizational needs.
In addition to the typical CRA-SOC, AP Triton CEO Mike Despain said Fresno County asked for the analysis to include a look at operational performance, the independent volunteer fire department system, county service contracts and alternative fire service delivery methods.
Fire protection district
The Fresno County Fire Protection District is an independent special district, meaning it is not managed as a department of the county government. Instead, the district is governed by a board of directors and operated by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) Fresno-Kings Unit through a contractual partnership.
According to the district’s history, it grew by integrating neighborhood fire protection services into a series of cooperative agreements. Since the early 1990s, it has spanned more than 2,600 square miles and encompasses the cities of Parlier, Mendota, Fowler, Huron and San Joaquin alongside unincorporated rural communities.
Although the district is independent from Fresno County, its jurisdiction has extended beyond the original boundaries to cover approximately 4,200 square miles, or two-thirds of the area of Fresno County. This change occurred in 2018, when FCFPD and Fresno County entered into a memorandum of understanding for the district to serve previously unprotected areas.
Key recommendations
Considering the district’s organizational structure and large service area, many recommendations for improvements revolved around centralizing standards and management and consolidating the district’s various fire and emergency services agreements.
Despain said Fresno County is one of the most operationally complex organizations he’s seen in California and probably the second-most complex one he’s seen in his four decades of experience in the fire service. With the protection district’s diversity in geography, with urban fringe areas, rural agricultural communities, mountain communities, remote regions and limited infrastructure, it takes a lot of different forms of service to provide fire protection in the county, Despain said.
“Whereas most counties might have a unified system, here you have just this plethora of agencies, including the combination of Fresno County Fire Protection District, volunteer fire departments, Cal Fire resources, county contracts, automatic aid systems, regional and mutual aid systems and partnerships, and all of this together is how you’ve formed the organization so far,” Despain said.
The AP Triton report recommends that the county formally include the FCFPD fire chief in the county’s executive management team, adding a position that reports directly to the CAO as a way to provide central executive oversight for all of Fresno County.
“This role would function as a senior level advisor to the county leadership while improving alignment between the emergency service operations, county priorities, budget development and long-term risk reduction strategies,” Despain said.
Despain said this wouldn’t replace existing leadership but would instead act as a coordinating authority that could focus on county-wide policies, regional collaboration and system-wide performance tracking.
Similarly, Despain recommended that the county consider creating a consolidated county fire and emergency services agreement under this executive leadership model. This would clear up conflicts between various service agreements and confusion over expectations, Despain said. Many contracts also have differing expiration dates, so one centralized agreement would streamline renegotiations.
Another recommendation was for the fire protection district to adopt specific, measurable response performance goals to guide its service delivery improvement. This could include goals related to emergency call processing, turnout and travel times and effective response force, which looks at the number of emergency personnel responding to an incident depending on type.
Nerland said the report “confirms a lot of things,” like evaluation results and recommendations, that he and Hail have been talking about for several years. Now with clear goals, Nerland said the county can move forward to phase in the improvement strategies outlined in the report.
