Members of the Merced City Council have decided to enter into a stop-gap agreement with the county to cover rural fire services in light of the planned Jan. 1 closure of the Cal Fire Station on McKee Road.
The leaders came to the rescue, if you will, at their most recent meeting on Dec. 16, with a unanimous public safety decision that comes after months of negotiations, and at a time when a grant-loaded City Fire Department is navigating growth strategies toward the recently annexed UC Merced campus.
Last May, the Merced County Board of Supervisors voted to close Station 85 on McKee, as well as Station 96 in Livingston, and merge a handful of other stations, as they grappled with how to financially keep up with state mandates on Cal Fire staffing levels. Those decisions were later postponed as county leaders put their hopes in a public safety ballot measure on the November ballot, as well as an application for a federal grant. Both failed as short-term solutions.
Consequently, in regard to the McKee Station, county staff made a request for city assistance in providing automatic aid to a region north of Highway 140, west of Kibby Road, west of North Lake Road and East of G Street.
A collaborative approach emerged in which the city fire crews would provide EMS response and initial fire response, and county crews would assume fire incident command upon arrival (bringing water tankers to the rural scene), as well as maintain responsibilities for fire prevention and investigation.
Pivotal to the discussion was the city’s highly mobile Squad 53, which consists of a modified pickup truck, manned by a fire engineer and firefighter, three shifts per day, with the ability to respond quickly to EMS calls. Squad 53 currently responds to about 28 percent of all incidents citywide, and it costs about $945,000 a year to maintain, not including overtime.
According to Cal Fire data, there were a total of 417 calls for service in the area served by the county’s McKee Road station in 2023. Of those, 265 were for emergency medical service, 10 were for structural fires, 6 were for vegetation fires, 91 were for “other fires,” 33 were for public assistance and 12 were hazardous materials related.
Under the new city-county contract, that runs from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2026, the county will pay the city $315,384 the first year, and around $328,000 in 2026 with an added 4 percent inflationary cost.
Interestingly, at their Dec. 16 meeting, Councilmembers Darin DuPont and Shane Smith both asked poignant questions about how officials arrived at the price point.
“My concern is that the amount of money that the county is paying to cover fire and medical coverage in their area is not going to cover the cost to the city to provide that service,” Smith said.
In response, Merced City Fire Chief Casey Wilson, who was presenting the plan to the Council, didn’t provide close estimates of the costs and benefits.
“Typically fire departments don’t source out their services to other neighbors,” he said. Wilson added that they looked at the “price per call,” and that came out to an “astronomically high number” and those “approaches were not well-received.”
He said the county and city decided on a “partnership approach to meet the needs of the county, city and university — which is also located in the area of fire service in question.
Wilson said he did some crunching of the numbers having to do with costs per call, and he assured the council that his department would be recovering costs for fuel and personnel, and “operationally we are not going to compromise coverage in the city.” He said his department is dividing up staffing in order to cover the region efficiently.
Councilman Smith appeared to step back after his initial questioning, saying “I don’t necessarily like the financial model, and if I had been the one negotiating it, I might have done it differently, but that’s not really my role.”
Said Smith, “I look at the fact that these are real people and our neighbors who have real concerns that they aren’t going to have fire service. And for me that’s the controlling criteria.”
However, Smith warned city officials and his colleagues about the perceived “fair trade” pact: “I’m really not wanting city staff to come back mid-year or something and have to take resources away from the city because we got things wrong here today.”
City Manager Scott McBride took the stand, so to speak, to offer what sounded like an explanation to calm concerns on the dais.
“You have the ability to get into the contract, and also get out of the contract,” McBride pointed out. “And this is for a two-year term because we know we got ‘Safer’ [federal grant funded] staff to make this coverage work. It’s not going past that. It’s a stop-gap. This is to continue some services for county residents. I think it gives us a chance to look forward to a better, long-term solution. This is nothing we’re going to do for the long term, at all.”
McBride added that fire coverage for the university is somewhat of another, long-term issue that will develop as the city expands out toward the campus.
Ultimately, the City Council voted 7-0 to approve the fire service agreement and revisit the strategy in six months, or around mid-July, to ensure it’s working effectively.
District 2 Merced County Supervisor Josh Pedrozo, who represents the city of Merced, spoke up during the meeting and urged city leaders for their support.
“As the city of Merced continues its future growth northward, the need for this partnership with the county becomes even more urgent,” Pedrozo said. “It is essential that the city and county work together to ensure a well-structured plan is in place for future annexations.”
Merced’s decision on Dec. 16 came after the Board of Supervisors voted to approve a cost-sharing agreement with the City of Livingston for $1.16 million to fund fire services for the next 18 months. Livingston is now in the process of establishing its own fire service after voters approved a 1 percent sales tax measure in November. Measure L is projected to raise $2.3 million annually.
Meanwhile, City of Dos Palos leaders have announced they will hold a special election in 2025 for the city’s own public safety sales tax measure that could come to the aid of two Cal Fire stations in their area. However, if it passes, the Dos Palos tax measure is only estimated to generate around $250,000 annually, and the cost to maintain minimum staffing at a single county Cal Fire station is $1.5 million.
During the Board of Supervisors meeting on Dec. 10, Mike Murphy blasted the board’s handling of the county’s fire station situation. Murphy is a former mayor of Merced who lives in the unincorporated area that is served by the McKee fire station.
“So we need to be realistic on what the process has been here,” he told supervisors. “To make an analogy, we’ve got children across the county that are finishing up their semester at school and getting grades. You get an ‘F’ for the process. It’s been horrible, and a failure. We had a neighborhood meeting in February. We had supervisors there. My supervisor, Mr. Pareira, and others, county staff, and not one mention was made that our fire station would close. There was an election happening two weeks later. Then the news broke. We were promised we would have a follow-up neighborhood meeting within six months. Not scheduled. It’s not for lack of trying.
“So, we’re going to be going through this process again, and it needs to be a better process. There were some bright spots, I’d say. Back in May, Chair Espinoza and Supervisor McDaniel actually said we should wait. ‘We can find a deal with the City of Merced. We don’t have to do this now.’ So thank you. But the other three voted to close McKee, eventually. …
“It’s unacceptable. This is all avoidable. We shared solutions. We found money in your budget that some of you didn’t even know you had. We said, give us time and there was no willingness to do that … So we are going to do this again [in the future], and let’s not do it in this [same] manner.”