The Cities of Reno, Sparks, and Washoe County Commissioners all passed motions in a joint meeting Thursday to start discussing ways to make our community safer from fires.
The meeting didn't change anything specific, but it does get the ball rolling on possible solutions for regional fire safety.
"This is the time, we need it now," said Mayor Hillary Schieve, City of Reno during the meeting. "Unfortunately, it took the Davis Fire for People to be like, 'oh my God things need to change in this region.'"
For more than three hours, the elected officials were talking through ideas to better work with one another.
"This region deserves it, we can be more efficient in our delivery of service," said Fire Chief Dave Cochran, Reno Fire Department. "We can eliminate redundancies."
A point that was thrown around a lot during the meeting, is resident's don't care what it is that comes to save the day.
"If a citizen is calling for assistance, they don't know or care about imaginary lines on an imaginary map," said Michael Clark, Washoe County Commissioner for District 2.
The meeting started with a presentation from the Washoe County Emergency Management team.
They talked about emergency plans and their many partners they currently work with to keep the community safe.
The team did say they feel the plans need to be updated and threw out an idea of bringing in a third party to do a study.
After that, each regional Fire Chief gave a presentation on what they believe will better the efforts.
There were two things that really stuck the landing in the room.
The first was a regional computer-aided dispatch system, that will be an asset later in the year.
"Regional CAD is a tool and what that does is allow the jurisdictions to share information across the electronic boundaries," Chief Cochran said.
"Eventually the new CAD will be in place, hopefully, in September, is the go live date," said Interim Fire Chief Dale Way, Truckee Meadows Fire and Rescue. "At which point every agency will be able to see one another's assets and dispatch them."
Reno and Sparks have different CAD systems than Truckee Meadows.
Fire Chiefs hope this eventually leads to having one singular dispatch center.
Once that regional CAD system is in place, it will lead to the second popular option discussed in the meeting.
"So, that gets us to a point where we can seriously consider unrestricted automatic aid," Interim Chief Way said.
Back in November, Reno Fire and TMFR started a new automatic agreement.
Both Reno Fire and TMFR say the agreement has proven to be successful.
Fire chiefs, however, are proposing for an unrestrictive auto agreement to enhance efforts even further.
The current agreement is only for specific areas, unrestrictive would allow the closest resource, no matter the jurisdiction, to respond first.
The chiefs say an agreement like that can't be done until the CAD system is integrated, but they can still have discussion on how to work together once the system is ready.
Regionalization and consolidation are two terms that often get lumped together, but they're two different ideas.
"Regionalization of services is more cooperation, collaboration with one another," Interim Chief Way said. "Consolidation is actually combining agencies which is very difficult, right? It involves funding and a governance scheme that has yet to be developed."
Consolidation is the step where residents may have to pay in taxes, but the region has a long way before that happens.
However, Chief Cochran thinks that should be the gold standard.
"I worked as a firefighter when we were consolidated," he said. "It was very effective. It was the best service operationally that we can provide to the region. I would like to see us return to that."
The regional Fire Chiefs, City Councilmembers and Commissioners will meet to discuss improvements.
They will report back in the next month or so, with their proposed ideas and findings.
