In the past few days, we have looked at the comparative cost of fire and EMS services in our region (part 1 here), the alternative funding models for city and regional fire districts (part 2 here) and the service levels that Edmonds receives from the South County Fire RFA under our current contract (part 3 here). Today I want to look at staffing levels and costs and ask whether Edmonds is paying too much or too little to the RFA for service.

RFA Staffing and Cost

A key feature of the contract that Edmonds signed with Fire District 1 (subsequently the South County Fire RFA), is the ability for Edmonds to negotiate the level of staffing in its stations. The initial contract called for 11 firefighters to be on duty at all times. In 2017, to reduce costs, the city renegotiated this staffing level down to 9 personnel. However, in subsequent years, the RFA complained to the city of an imbalance in service levels. The neighboring unit utilization factor (NUUF) metric showed units from outside of Edmonds consistently coming into Edmonds more often than units from Edmonds were going into the RFA territory. This showed that demand for service in Edmonds was higher than what we were paying for.

After some negotiation in which the city proposed adding two, two-person units during peak hours only, the eventual agreement was to add back one, two-person aid unit operating 24/7 at a cost of $1.5 million annually to the city, starting in 2022.  This $1.5 million adjustment is a big part of the cost increase that has been cited between 2021 and 2025. The NUUF chart presented by the RFA at the council meeting on Feb. 25 shows that after this aid unit was added, the metrics moved back into balance. Units from Lynnwood continued to service Edmonds more than Edmonds was servicing Lynnwood, but the Edmonds units have been responding to Mountlake Terrace more than vice versa. And the metric for the RFA overall was at 92% for 2022 and 2023, which is considered in balance. In fact, this shows that Edmonds units are providing more mutual aid to other parts of the RFA than we are receiving from the RFA, but the contract allows for a plus or minus 10% swing to be considered balanced.

The data for 2024 shows that the trends for Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace remain mostly unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but the overall RFA metric was very out of balance. The RFA did not explain why that imbalance arose but speculated that a two-alarm fire at the Cedar Court Apartments — which required all 11 Edmonds firefighters plus 50 additional firefighters — may have shifted the numbers significantly. Since this metric is key to understanding whether Edmonds is paying enough for the services that we receive, an updated version of this chart with that outlier incident removed would be a very helpful data point. If that still shows an imbalance, further investigation of the reasons for the swing from previous years would be necessary because metrics like this don’t typically swing so wildly without specific actions being taken to affect them.

The transport balancing factor metric looks at the balance between Edmonds based units transporting EMS patients outside of the city boundary vs other units doing transports within Edmonds. This was out of balance prior to the addition of the extra aid car, but data for 2022 and 2023 shows that the Edmonds units are more than meeting their obligations to the wider community. Here too though, the 2024 data show a major shift, not only in terms of the balance achieved but also the total number of transports reported under this metric. Note that this metric does not cover transports by Edmonds units within Edmonds or transports by non-Edmonds units outside of Edmonds. In response to questions from Councilmember Chen about this, the RFA noted that the reduction in total transports covered by this metric may have been impacted by movement of resources: They earlier reported that the aid car that was added in 2022 was initially at the Esperance station but has been moved to Maplewood, which has helped with the balancing of demand. For context, the RFA handles over 15,000 transports per year and Edmonds handles around 3,000, so this metric only covers a fraction of the total.

Unit Hour Utilization Factor measures the percentage of time that a unit is out on a call. In their report, the RFA noted that unit hour utilization levels above 20% are a trigger for looking at deployment options and additional resources. Here, the data shows that, while utilization was approaching that 20% threshold in 2022 and 2023, levels have come back down in 2024. Here too, I suspect that the 2020 levels were impacted by COVID because 2019 levels from last year’s annual report are very comparable to 2021 levels in this year’s report.  Note that the location of Station 17, with water to the west, significantly limits the territory that can be covered from that station.

For now, pending further understanding of the 2024 NUUF data, these metrics appear to suggest that the current staffing levels in Edmonds are sufficient, although the distribution of resources between Edmonds, Lynnwood and Mountlake Terrace is probably not optimal.

I spoke to RFA Chief Bob Eastman at the recent event sponsored by the Edmonds Civic Roundtable to discuss the upcoming RFA annexation vote, and I asked him directly about this.

On the question of whether the RFA was planning to increase staffing in Edmonds if we approve annexation, Chief Eastman said that was not necessarily the case, but that annexation would allow him flexibility to deploy resources more optimally.  He also noted that the RFA has plans to build three new fire stations including one at the Value Village location on Highway 99 and another at Alderwood Parkway. The addition of these new stations would require incremental staffing. I then asked whether the addition of these stations would improve the response times that we are seeing but he was non-committal on that, speaking instead about reducing mutual aid requirements for non-adjacent units. I understood that to mean that, for example, the demand for units based at Maplewood to respond to events in Lynnwood could be reduced. This could have positive effects in two ways: It would keep that unit in place in Edmonds to respond to emergencies here and — by dispatching a unit from one of those new stations — it could improve the response time of a second or third unit required at an incident in Lynnwood. Similarly, these new stations could reduce the response time for second or third units responding to an incident in the north part of Edmonds, particularly if the downtown unit is already on a call.

So, if our staffing levels are adequate and we are paying the contracted rates for those resources, why does the RFA claim that we are not paying parity with the residents of the cities that are annexed to the RFA? There are several factors to consider here:

– We pay 10% for administrative overhead and 10% for operations and maintenance. These rates seem low so a case can be made that some increase is due in these areas.

– The RFA provides specialized services like technical rescue and hazardous materials service that are necessary in a fire district of this size, but which are not part of the contract that Edmonds pays for.

– There has been a rapid escalation in the cost of fire equipment in recent years. This has been driven by consolidation among providers of fire equipment resulting in monopoly pricing.

– The scale of the RFA and the resources that it can offer allows it to maintain a level 3 fire class protection rating, which is among the top 15% in Washington state. This fire class rating directly impacts what we pay for homeowners’ insurance.

OK, but is $19 million to $20 million a fair cost for Edmonds residents to pay for the same service that they are getting today? I have already argued that the dilution of the tax levy will reduce the eventual bill by around $1.5 million.  The comparative analysis of costs in neighboring areas also suggests that the amount we pay should be lower than what is being projected under the annexation proposal. I also did an analysis of what parity cost would really look like if the goal is to have all areas of the RFA pay the same amount. The RFA 2025 budget, shows approximately $72 million in property tax levy revenue, plus about $8 million in fire benefit charges, plus about $12.5 million from the Edmonds contract. This adds up to approximately $92.5 million of tax/fee revenue with the balance of the revenue coming from transport fees and a variety of small miscellaneous sources.

If Edmonds has 14% of the RFA population, our net cost of service should be 14% of $92.5 million, which is about $13 million. According to RFA data, Edmonds accounts for approximately 16.4% of all calls to 911 and that is probably reflective of the higher average age of Edmonds residents compared to the rest of the RFA. If we use that percentage rather than the percentage of population, Edmonds’ share would be $15.2 million. This is obviously a simplistic analysis and is not intended to provide any sort of definitive guide as to what the right amount should be. It does, however, put a data point on the table that supports the notion that we need to pay more but not as much as $19 million to $20 million.

Summary and Conclusions

In my role as a customer service manager, I always tried to find the path of most clarity and least bias. My job was to advocate for customers dealing with problems in large and complex environments but also to know when the customer was being unreasonable or when their actions were contributing to the problems they were experiencing. I believe this has made me well qualified to attempt to thread the needle on this very complex topic and try to see the issue from both sides. You don’t need to agree with everything I have said in these columns and, in fact, if you disagree and you have data or evidence that contradicts what I have said, I welcome you to share that with the readers of My Edmonds News. The April vote is one of the most important civic events this city has seen in recent years, and it is important that we have a well-informed electorate to make a wise decision.

Whatever the outcome of April’s vote, two things are abundantly clear in the immediate aftermath:

1. We are going to pay substantially more for fire and EMS service in the future.
2. South County Fire will continue to provide fire and EMS service to Edmonds, whether under a modified contract or with Edmonds as a full member of the RFA.

If we vote yes, that is not the end of the story. Retaining the $6.5 million in tax revenue that is currently helping to pay for the fire contract merely plugs a gap in next year’s city budget, but it does not restore the reserves that have been depleted, repay the interfund loans that are supporting this year’s budget, or get the city out of its fiscal crisis. There will be another levy vote in the fall to raise additional revenue for the city to address those issues, and the amount that the city will ask for is dependent on whether the annexation vote passes. If we vote no, the city will have to ask for a bigger levy increase to get out of its current fiscal mess.

However, while this may look different to the city, the net effect on the taxpayers of Edmonds is a wash. Either way we need a plan to pay for fire and EMS services, maintain city services and dig ourselves out of the fiscal crisis — and the total bill for doing that doesn’t change depending on whether we are paying those taxes to the RFA or the city.

If annexation passes, then the next steps are clear but if it fails, then what next? There are some who are advocating for Edmonds to restart its own fire department, but I do not agree with this approach.  In addition to the fact that the city would incur overlapping costs for starting up its own department and paying for the contract with the RFA at a time when we have literally no reserves, one only has to look at how cities like Mukilteo and Everett are struggling to manage their own fire departments to realize that the decision Edmonds made in 2010 was the right one.

Rather than pursue the path of local control that a city owned fire department represents, I advocate instead that we go all-in on maximizing the value of a regional fire service. This starts with things that matter to us; like a commitment to leverage the fire benefit charge in a much more significant way to level the playing field between high assessed property value communities like Edmonds and other parts of the RFA (which will also receive a windfall from increasing the benefit charge component of the revenue system). In addition, the RFA needs to do a better job of quantifying what three new fire stations — and the increased costs that come with that — will mean in terms of improved response times, saved lives, etc.?

While we’re at it, let’s open the book on staffing levels across the RFA. Are current staffing levels, especially during off-peak hours, optimal for delivering the essential services that we are paying for or are there other staffing models that would deliver improved services at lower cost? What about some of the ideas for reducing the drain on department resources for things like hospital admissions wait times? Can we adopt a model like Everett has where a private ambulance service, contracted to the RFA, handles some portion of non-life-threatening transports? Or would a model like the Medic One service in Cook County, with dedicated paramedics for the most serious EMS cases, provide a better solution to rising costs and limited resources? Perhaps we could align ourselves with Everett and Mukilteo to seek an outcome that benefits all those cities and produces a win-win-win for us, for the existing members of the RFA and for the RFA itself if all three cities were to annex together.

These and other outcomes can be achieved from inside the RFA by working through the fire commissioners, but they could also be achieved in direct negotiations between Edmonds and the RFA if the annexation vote fails and could secure a successful vote on a second attempt.

Niall McShane is an Edmonds resident, occasional contributor to Scene in Edmonds and a retired IBM executive with experience in managing software development and customer service organizations.