Island County may withdraw from an interlocal agreement with county fire districts after some of them, including two on Whidbey, struggled to maintain the staff necessary to complete the terms of the agreement.
Under the interlocal agreement, four fire departments within Island County perform annual fire safety inspections on behalf of the county in buildings such as businesses, churches, schools, day care facilities and others located on county property to ensure they are in compliance with state and federal codes.
The county does not currently have any in-house staff certified to perform these inspections.
Planning director Mary Engle told county commissioners during a workshop meeting June 1 that in meeting with fire departments to update the interlocal agreement, she discovered that Central Whidbey Island Fire and Rescue has been the only one of the four fire departments included in the agreement that has consistently followed through with its annual inspections over the past four years.
The Camano Island fire district asked to be removed from the new agreement and have the county perform the required inspections for buildings within its jurisdiction.
All three Whidbey districts want to remain in the agreement, Engle said, though North Whidbey Fire and Rescue and South Whidbey Fire/EMS have not kept up with their annual inspections in the recent past.
Engle said the COVID-19 pandemic and low staffing may be contributing factors to the districts’ inability to complete the terms of the agreement.
South Whidbey Fire Chief Nicholas Walsh said the interlocal agreement states that a participating fire department need not “conduct inspections beyond its resources,” and that South Whidbey Fire/EMS has not had sufficient staff to complete inspections.
“We are very interested in conducting fire safety inspections going forward and we are currently training our officers to become certified inspectors,” he wrote in an email. “I hope to have South Whidbey Fire/EMS conducting fire safety inspections by the end of the year.”
North Whidbey Fire Chief John Clark said that when he arrived at the district in March 2020, the duty crew had been performing inspections regularly. The onslaught of the pandemic froze inspections and many other department activities that involved interaction with the public. Last year also brought a reduction in duty crew staffing due to a contractual change with WhidbeyHealth.
The department did not resume inspections in March of this year because of the staff reduction, and because the interlocal agreement “lacked an effective means to ensure code violations as identified by duty crew personnel were corrected,” which department personnel feared could become a liability for the department, Clark wrote in an email.
The interlocal agreement is voluntary for fire departments, Clark said; fire code inspections, violation corrections and code enforcement are ultimately the county’s responsibility.
With one district withdrawing from the agreement, and two of the three remaining not having completed the inspections in the past, Engle suggested county commissioners consider relying upon in-house staff to conduct the inspections.
“It may be in our best interest to find out how we could actually provide this service from our office instead,” she said.
Commissioner Jill Johnson was in favor of leaving the agreement, saying that since the county is about to become responsible for Camano inspections anyway, it may as well complete all inspections across the board.
Commissioner Melanie Bacon was concerned about the staff and time necessary to complete all the required annual fire inspections in the county. She suggested that the county maintain the interlocal agreement with the three Whidbey districts for now, using Camano Island as a trial run to see how significant a burden the task would be for the county before doing away with the agreement on Whidbey, too.
The commissioners did not come to a final decision about how to proceed with the interlocal agreement during the meeting June 1.
