Travis County Emergency Services District No. 4 is in a “death spiral,” said Bob Nicks, president of the Austin Firefighters Association and Austin Fire Department battalion chief.

ESD 4 provides firefighting services to unincorporated areas of the county, including the Four Points areas of Westminster Glen Estates, Glenlake and Long Canyon as well as the more distant neighborhoods surrounding McNeil High School, Canyon Creek, Spicewood Road and Springdale Road in addition to Austin Colony near Bastrop.

Its large, disjointed geographic region accounts for ESD 4’s long response times—14 minutes or more to the McNeil High School area from its closest station on City Park Road—to reach the residents it is charged with servicing as well as its declining coffers, ESD 4 Fire Chief David Bailey said.

After a decade of discussions about how to remedy the service coverage problems for ESD 4 and other Austin-area ESDs, district and city stakeholders now say they may have found a workable solution.

On June 9, Austin City Council approved a resolution directing the city manager to work with ESD 4 and other associations to review the district’s assets, staffing and equipment in an effort to consider joining the district and AFD in a contract for services. A report to the city’s Public Safety Committee regarding the review is set for Sept. 22.

Annexation divides ESD 4

ESD 4 began as a Rural Fire Protection District in 1985 and included about 100 square miles on the northern side of Austin, Bailey said. Along with the county’s other RFPDs, the district was converted by state legislative action into an ESD in 1995, allowing the district to raise taxes as its funding mechanism.

The district, as was required by statute, included one contiguous boundary in its geographic makeup, Bailey said. The majority of the district was located in the city’s extraterritorial jurisdiction, or ETJ—land outside of Austin’s coverage for utilities but within its range of annexation. As the city annexed more areas within this region, it carved the once-unified district into the multiple islands of coverage that exist today, Bailey said.

“Since 2001—52 times—Austin has reached in [to ESD 4] and grabbed a piece,” Bailey said. “[My viewpoint] isn’t anti-annexation. It’s just the reality of what [the ESD] has become. What we planned and what we created years ago is no longer the case. What I’m left with is six islands of protection.”

He said the city’s strip annexation within these areas—annexing 200 feet on either side of a roadway—took away significant revenue from ESD 4’s commercial and retail centers, leaving the district with the lower taxable entities of single-family homes, trailer parks, nonprofit churches [and] schools.

“We can say for sure that we’ve lost 64 percent of our original property,” Bailey said. “I can’t convert that into dollars. We can make some guesses, but we can’t be sure because you are talking about 20 years.”

Austin City Planner Virginia Collier said she agrees annexation is to blame for the geographic splintering of ESD 4.

“ESD [4] and [Austin’s] ETJ covered similar areas,” she said. “As the city continues to grow [by annexation], the ESD will shrink. It is a trade-off.”

However, Collier said AFD is helping serve ESD 4 and other ESDs with Austin’s enhanced responses to outside emergency calls.

“There is a plan for a response, and the city will back up the ESD if needed,” she said.

City staff has no current plans to annex the ETJ areas left to ESD 4, Collier said.

“Annexation includes [providing] a whole range of city services,” she said. “True, fire protection is one of those services but it doesn’t prioritize those sections over others in the annexation schedule.”

Reciprocal aid

Bailey said that although his closest fire truck is 14 minutes from McNeil High School, AFD has a station that is much nearer to the area. However, ESD 4 lacks an interlocal agreement with the city, or automatic aid, that would enable the closest engine to respond to a dispatch call for help, he said. Instead, the parties have a mutual aid agreement, he said.

Mutual aid permits assistance once a first-responder agency requests help from dispatch, Bailey said. The problem is that a provider must be on the scene asking for help, he said.

Automatic aid allows the closest engine “regardless of the patch on the [firefighter’s] shoulder” to respond to the emergency and does not consider the jurisdiction the responder is from, he said.

Eight Travis County ESDs have automatic aid, a designation that is determined primarily by the compatibility of the ESD’s apparatuses with the cities—the number of firefighters on each engine, equipment, training and   the department’s reciprocity to respond to service, Bailey said.

ESD 4 staffs its trucks with three firefighters, and AFD requires four crew members on its trucks, he said. Most of the time, AFD helps ESD 4 as opposed to ESD 4 helping AFD, he said.

“I don’t have the money to run four-person staffing, and in Austin that has been a big-ticket item for many, many years,” Bailey said.

He cited an instance in which three teenagers were injured at a facility in the McNeil High School area, ESD 4’s jurisdiction. An ESD 4 officer responded to the call and alerted closer Austin stations about the situation, asking if they could respond.

“Austin went and had an engine on the scene within seven minutes,” Bailey said. “We got there about 10 minutes later.”

The first responders are making the responses to calls for aid work, he said. If a second ESD 4 engine is needed on an emergency scene, it would be another 20 minutes’ travel time, he said.

“There are other situations where, quite frankly, it turns out much, much worse to where the officers don’t know, the dispatcher doesn’t know [the long travel distance from the station to the emergency scene] and you’ve got a horrible response time,” Bailey said. “Because we’ve been so carved up, because we’re so isolated and fragmented, viability to deliver service is really challenged.”

Service contract proposal

Although ESD 4 has operated as many as eight fire stations at one time, the district’s six “islands” are now serviced by three fire stations—located on City Park Road, Springdale Road and in Austin Colony. The district has 30 career firefighters and three fire engines, Bailey said.

ESD 4’s assets include about $1.8 million in annual property tax revenue and about $1.7 million in annual sales tax revenue, he said.

The proposed contract for services with AFD provides ESD 4’s governing board will continue to exist but only to collect the approximately $3.5 million in revenue that will be passed on to the city to manage the district’s stations and personnel.

“In this situation, my members become members of the Austin Fire Department,” Bailey said. “They are paid twice what I can pay them. Their salaries will be significantly higher. My beginning firefighter starts at $42,000. [The] city of Austin [firefighter salary] is much higher than that.”

He said ESD 4’s apparatuses will need to be upgraded to AFD’s standards before joining the AFD fleet and the department will have to provide for a fourth firefighter on its trucks. Although ESD 4’s firefighters will become members of AFD, bargaining agreements with the unions for both AFD and ESD 4 provide leeway for some of the district’s firefighters to be subject to a shortened training period to become AFD firefighters and enter the department as members with two years counted toward their experience, he said.

“What we’re really after is full integration,” said Bailey, who noted he will be retired and his position eliminated if this proposal comes to fruition. “We don’t want to be a division of [AFD]. We want to look and feel like one of [AFD’s] 50 fire stations and our 30 members to look and feel like one of their 1,000 firefighters.”

Glenlake Homeowners Association President Michael Reitzel said his neighborhood was initially opposed to the proposition for fear of higher taxes and was concerned about possible mismanagement issues by prior ESD 4 board members.

“ESD 4 is slowly going away as parts of it get annexed,” Reitzel said. “We decided that the possibility of a higher tax bill was worth [the consolidation] to have competent management you could trust.”

Potential budget gap

Bailey said he and Nicks are seeking funding for a $1.5 million shortfall between ESD 4’s current structure and the finances needed to bring the district up to AFD’s standards.

“Austin says if I take you over, it’s going to cost me more money because of the way we do business than it does in ESD 4,” Bailey said. “Somebody has to commit to the extra money—the city of Austin or Travis County or a combination of both.”

For Nicks, the issue is more widespread than just ESD 4.

“These [annexation] practices [of Austin] caused an issue,” Nicks said. “[The result of these practices] is highly accentuated with ESD 4. [The practices are] also not as obvious map-wise on the other ESDs, but in their tax base, [annexation] does make a big difference.”

For Austin, the merger may be a way to improve AFD’s response times and fill AFD’s need for additional stations at a lower cost.

Austin has six fewer fire stations than what the city needs to have, Nicks said. There is 2012 bond money left to build one more station, leaving a five-station deficit, he said.

“I hope Austin sees that strategically for the future, this [proposal] positions them better than they’ve ever been,” Bailey said. “Why are they six stations behind? Because when deals like this came up, they ignored them and annexed without it.”

He said it takes six to 10 years and $6 million to build one fire station.

“[ESD 4] stations come all-included, ready to operate, ready to function as an Austin fire station,” Bailey said. “We use the same radios. We use the same fire trucks. Austin is behind, and we have assets.”

Possibilities

If the consolidation does not take place, it could be devastating to some areas of ESD 4, Bailey said.

“ESD 4 will fold eventually,” Nicks said. “I’m not going to say it’s going to happen next month, but as more annexations occur, the density in that area is probably going to increase past the annexations and [ESD 4] will be challenged to continue to provide service. That’s why we are putting a lot of effort into this, because it’s important.”

Bailey said the possible closure of ESD 4—if the budget gap is not filled—may result in about 7,000 addresses, including 2,000 businesses, being left without emergency services protection. Those citizens would be forced to either join another ESD if one accepts them, consolidate fully into AFD if the department accepts them or form a standalone department separate from the other remaining ESD 4 islands, he said.

“[The city of Austin’s] own practices to some degree created the situation that is untenable for the citizens,” Nicks said. “I’m actually encouraging the county and the city policymakers to come up with this gap money so we can get this thing resolved and maybe become a model for other ESDs in the future. [We should] try to bring [ESDs] in when they start reaching that tipping point where they can’t provide service as well anymore.

“[The problem] is bigger than ESD 4. I think we are going to see a lot of issues with ESDs losing revenue over the next 20 years. This would be a method to solve those problems.”