Grimsby and Lincoln are working on a transition plan after town councillors in both municipalities agreed to stop sharing a fire chief and go back to separate fire services.
Meeting separately in special sessions on Wednesday, both councils voted to end the arrangement as was recommended by Emergency Management Group (EMG), a consulting firm hired to review the matter.
The move effectively ends a pilot project that began in 2021 but never really got off the ground.
Members of the joint fire services committee that had been overseeing the project voted in October to return to separate services.
Rick Monkman, a former deputy fire chief in Barrie and senior fire services adviser with EMG, told Grimsby council the endeavour started with shared administration, fire prevention and training and was supposed to move on to shared fire suppression services, but that never happened — only a move to retain a shared fire chief.
“Which in essence reverted the Niagara West Fire and Emergency Services (NWFES) back to two individual fire departments,” said Monkman, who added EMG’s report does not preclude Grimsby and Lincoln from looking into shared firefighting services in the future.
He said the firm was unable to gather enough information to conduct a full review.
“Without having good data in place, (it) was also very difficult to come up with a good assessment of what did work or didn’t work,” he said.
NWFES Deputy Chief Jim Kay was more blunt, calling the pilot “a generic plan that was kind of set up to fail from the beginning.”
Kay said councillors were not purposely kept in the dark about the project, but did say there was little communication that filtered back to town halls.
“The joint (fire services) committee, for lack of a better word, was somewhat neutered and so that led to a lack of communication,” Kay said.
He said if they a similar pilot is undertaken in the future, a governance and reporting structure should be established in advance with a detailed operational plan and regular communication with council.
Grimsby Mayor Jeff Jordan said the pilot originated with his town’s previous council. He, too, said communication was a big problem.
“The full council was never really informed of how it was moving forward,” Jordan said. “We were basically kept in the dark.”
Ward 1 Coun. Delight Davoli said some aspects of the project were difficult to grasp. She said cost sharing for the initiative was based on “a wonky formula that I don’t think any of us understood the logic behind it.”
Ward 4 Coun. Jacob Baradziej, also joint committee chair, said the project was never given a chance to move forward for “political reasons.”
“I definitely feel it is something that will need to be reopened in the future,” Baradziej said. “Both Grimsby and Lincoln will eventually grow to need a full-time service, and although that day is not today and it is not tomorrow, it is inevitable, and common sense would indicate going full time in a shared fashion would save the taxpayer tremendously.”
In Lincoln, after hearing from an EMG representative, councillors voted to end the shared chief arrangement without debate.
Niagara West fire Chief Greg Hudson told councillors the initiative was a good learning experience that gave fire officials a chance to ponder what needs to be done to address growth in both towns.
“I wouldn’t categorize our experience as being unsuccessful, but I think perhaps the outcome wasn’t quite what we expected (from) the onset,” Hudson said. “It really was a bit of a misnomer to call it a pilot because we really didn’t implement it fully.”
Mike Kirkopoulos, Lincoln’s chief administrative officer, said it could take up to a month for him and Sarah Kim, his Grimsby counterpart, to put together a transition plan for returning to fully separate fire services.
“The whole notion of shared fire services, I think, can work,” Kirkopoulos said. “But it does require an appropriate partner and it requires a willingness to do so.”