EDITORIAL: MVFD solutions: from within, or from without?

The Moapa Valley Fire District (MVFD) has been trodding two separate paths since last October. That was when an emotionally charged MVFD Board meeting took place regarding the district’s future. In attendance was County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick, Clark County Fire Department (CCFD) Chief Greg Cassell and various other county staffers and officials.

During that meeting, local volunteers despaired that there were periods of time, now and again, when the district’s volunteer force runs thin and there is an absence of any Emergency Medical Service (EMS) coverage from the community. This was pointed out only in the broader context of a long-standing neglect of the district by CCFD governance and the difficulty for the district in addressing problems under this monstrous bureaucracy. But Kirkpatrick latched onto that one isolated problem immediately, determined to fix it now.

That quest for Kirkpatrick’s fix is the first of the two paths which have been followed since October. Last week in a special Town Hall Meeting, she rolled out her final plan to the community. It wasn’t popular. It was to use MVFD funds to contract with an outside, privately-owned ambulance company and cover the gaps for the local volunteers. The County has already put out a Request For Proposal (RFP) earlier this month. Kirkpatrick expects it to come back at no more than $400,000 in cost. She hopes less.

Meanwhile, there has been a second journey underway, taking a different road, to solve the same problem. While Kirkpatrick has been working for the fix to be brought in from outside of the district, the MVFD board has been quietly working to solve it from within. Last March, the chiefs of the three local stations proposed a plan whereby the district hire paid, part-time personnel – qualified and willing people from within MVFD ranks – to fill those EMS gaps. Furthermore, to incentivize recruitment within the volunteer ranks, they proposed a modest pay-per-call system to compensate volunteers. They projected that all of this could be done for around $300,000 per year. This appears to be less expensive, a better value, and more permanent than the RFP plan. And it could work if only the county red tape could be cut away to allow for the local MVFD board to call its own shots.

That very point is the chief difference between the two plans. Indeed it was the core issue of all the discussion and debate that has happened since October: that pesky old question of home rule.
Kirkpatrick’s plan might solve the short term problem. But her solution comes from the outside. It imposes upon, rather than coordinates with, the local board. And if continued into the long term, it would strap the MVFD budget and lead to greater dependency on the county.

The MVFD plan has proven that the local board has the ideas, the organization, the capability and the will to solve its own problems: both short- and long-term. The board is ready to do that today – last month, actually. All it needs is to be cut free to do so.

Granted, some changes are needed first to the MVFD structure as Kirkpatrick claims. Her proposal to beef up the board and to hire a full-time chief to manage the district are right on. There is plenty of local leadership talent sitting on the bench of this community who could fill those roles. But why do they sit on the bench? Because there are very few civic leadership roles in this community that bear any true autonomy. If a board can’t make final decisions to solve its own problems – if its only purpose is to put a rubber stamp on whatever the county commissioner has planned for it – then why put in the time?

In short, there is nothing terribly wrong with Kirkpatrick’s plan on the surface. It does solve the short term issue of EMS coverage. But it does not address the root problem of big city red tape clogging the district’s ability to solve problems with common-sense local initiatives. As long as it is viewed as a short-term solution on the way to providing greater autonomy for the MVFD board, however, Kirkpatrick’s one year RFP is fine. Unfortunately, that’s not how it looked, nor how it smelled, at last week’s Town Hall meeting.

There ought to be a stated plan in place, with a specific timeline, for turning over full governance of the MVFD to the local board. Otherwise, there is only more red tape, more inefficiency, and more power struggles in the future for the MVFD.