05-13-2024 CC Agenda Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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CITY OF ORONO 2750 K ELLEY P ARKWAY ,O RONO ,M INNESOTA 55356 www.oronomn.gov May 13, 2024 Long Lake City Council VIA EMAIL: sweske@longlakemn.gov City of Long Lake 450 Virginia Avenue, PO Box 606 Long Lake, MN 55356 Dear Long Lake City Council, Thank you for your letter dated 8 May 2024. We appreciate you for reaching out and providing clarity on the proposed partnership model regarding fire service between our cities. We also value you allowing your City Administrator and Fire Chief to meet and coordinate with ours. We acknowledge the dedication and commitment both parties have shown in exploring avenues for collaboration.Although we have discussed all reasonable options in mediation over the last several months, we remain open to continuing a dialogue concerning future partnering opportunities. We encourage a continuation of those efforts as we believe it is in the best interest of both of our cities for open communication to plan for a smooth and coordinated process to bring the current contract to a close. The City of Orono has established the Orono Fire Department (OFD), which will provide safe, efficient and cost-effective emergency services to our residents now and into the future. As part of this process, we are establishing an emergency services organization that is directly accountable to the Orono City Council in line with the other services and we provide our citizens and other municipalities. The creation of the OFD further allows for integration with Orono’s existing departments functions such as of finance, information technology, human resources, fleet, facilities,and public works. Further,the new department gains significant advantages and efficiency with our other branch of public safety in the Orono Police Department. The OFD has a new organizational service model which includes full time and part time ‘career’ firefighters as well as ‘volunteer’ paid-on call firefighters. The staffing model includes dedicated part time firefighters serving on duty crews during the majority of the day. This will allow for more efficient and quick response times; serve to mitigate the local and national trends surrounding reliance on ‘volunteer’ staffing concerns; and offer increased opportunity for integration with other full time emergency responders and city services. Building a new department takes significant time, effort and resourcing. Therefore,as allowed by the contract, we began this process last year and enacted a phased approach by providing service to our Navarre area July 2024 and then the remainder of Orono in January 2026. We appreciate your willingness to accommodate our transition process but feel some more context on our readiness would be helpful for you.Although it looks different, we are confident in the services we will be offering and the level of safety and responsiveness we will provide.We have nearly doubled the staff serving Navarre area moving from 11 ‘volunteer’ paid on-call firefighters to a total of 19 firefighters consisting of both ‘career’ duty crew and ‘volunteer’ paid on-call.Our department has decades of combined experience, are well trained and certified. By maintaining ‘career’ duty crew members from 6am to 10pm daily, we will have responders immediately ready for service.While the 225