Southern Marin Fire Protection District will share fire chiefs with Mill Valley as part of a two-year pilot agreement.
Tom Welch, Mill Valley fire chief, will assume the role of deputy chief of operations and training, while Southern Marin Fire Chief Chris Tubbs will retain the fire chief position, Mill Valley Mayor Jim Wickham said.
“It’s not a full merger,” Wickham said. “But it will provide for better collaboration.”
The agreement divides responsibilities between Welch and Tubbs to reduces redundancies in their duties.
Under the shared services agreement, Tubbs and his staff will be responsible for five fire stations and one administrative office, with 86 firefighters, support and prevention staff. Operations and training are two divisions within the Mill Valley Fire Department, and Welch will manage both.
He said there are no direct cost savings because unlike the 2014 agreement to share battalion chiefs, which reduced the number of chiefs by one, both agencies are retaining their fire chief positions. Welch’s annual base salary with Mill Valley is $184,000 annually. Tubbs earns about $204,000 per year at the fire district.
The City Council passed the agreement at its meeting on Jan. 6. Southern Marin’s board signed off on the deal Wednesday.
The arrangement allows firefighters, engineers and captains in Mill Valley and the fire district to work together seamlessly, respond to emergencies more efficiently and learn from each other, Welch said.
“This is a great opportunity for our firefighters to cross-pollinate a bit and challenge themselves in different areas,” he said. “And it’s a great opportunity for command staff to work as a team to lead both organizations into the future.”
Mill Valley City Manager Jim McCann said the council passed the agreement to streamline service by sharing fire chiefs, upper management and fire personnel between the city and the district. The agreement, however, is not a consolidation of departments, he said.
“We will still have our chief and battalion chief and the administrative aide on our payroll so we’re not eliminating any positions and we are not paying less,” McCann said. “In that regard it remains the same, we may take advantage of some of the fire prevention services and programs through Southern Marin, which has a more substantial prevention division, but we would have to pay for those.”
He said the agreement builds off sharing battalion chiefs with the fire district. The shared battalion chief agreement has saved the city and the district about $300,000 each annually.
Marin Professional Firefighters Association President John Bagala said while these types of mergers have occurred in cities and towns across Marin, merging upper management is unusual because neither chief has announced their retirement.
“A lot of places where a merger takes place a chief position is done away with,” Bagala said. “This is the first to try to maintain all chief positions while doing a merger.”
Mill Valley contracted Citygate Associates, a consulting firm focused on fire and emergency services, to review potential opportunities in the shared management agreement. In the staff report, Citygate recommended if the pilot is successful after five quarters the agencies should work to create a permanent single employer framework.
Councilman John McCauley said while a full consolidation is possible, it will require a lot of work since the city and the district fund salaries and benefits differently.
“I think that the movement to a common salary structure is daunting,” McCauley said. “I think it can be done, but we’ll need a lot of smart people putting a lot of work into it to make it fair, equitable and manageable. Five quarters is not likely. It might take years to get there, it’s extremely difficult. But with that one concern everything else is fantastic.”
McCann said the potential of a complete consolidation is there, but the agreement to share a fire chief is not the first step toward that. He said merging fire services completely would require a special district or joint powers agreement to be formed.
“That’s something that would need significant conversation and discussion,” he said. “It’s something we definitely want to have input from the community about. It’s certainly a council decision and there are different ways to do it as mentioned.”
Wickham said that the agreement is the result of how fire services are changing as cities and towns face an increased fire threat.
“This isn’t a groundbreaking testimony here,” he said. “Larkspur, Corte Madera, Central Marin, San Rafael, Marinwood, Marin County, Ross Valley, have done something like this and here we are doing this — maybe Tiburon might wake up.”
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