“At its high point, we had all but one police officer cross-trained,” said Director of Public Safety John Swenson. “Currently, we have eight cross-trained police officers.” He said there was no way to know that it may not be a sustainable model because not many cities are doing it.
Many of the city’s paid on-call firefighters work day jobs during the week, so they are not able to respond to calls for fire service. In 2020, Swenson and city leaders worked with labor union representatives to create two new full-time dual positions: police officer-fire fighter and (police) sergeant-firefighter and advertised for the positions at the beginning of this year. Swenson also had meetings with his current staff to see if anyone would be interested.
“What we heard from our employees was the interest level wasn’t there for those two positions,” he said.
So it was back to the drawing board for Swenson, who told city council in February the department will now look at three options for better daytime firefighter response:
- Pay a professional, privately-owned firefighting crew. Swenson said this practice exists in other states but not currently in Minnesota, so it’s not a hugely viable option.
- Create a pool of part-time firefighters from existing city employees.
- Contact neighboring jurisdictions to look for ways to collaborate. Swenson said he has had conversations with departments Lino Lakes already has mutual aid and auto aid agreements with, including Forest Lake, Spring Lake Park-Blaine-Mounds View, and Centennial.
The timing is particularly interesting because Centennial Fire District leaders recently commissioned a consultant’s report to address similar daytime response times. One big takeaway from the study, released in February, is that if Centennial still had a station in Lino Lakes, its response times would be vastly improved. Because its coverage area is so spread out (Lino and the chain of lakes cuts between Circle Pines and Centerville), response times can be lengthy if one station is already on a call and another call comes in.
Swenson said he will be having more conversations with Centennial Fire District leadership in the coming weeks.
“This is really a conversation about: is there any room to expand the existing relationship that would mutually benefit both jurisdictions–meaning resources would be going both ways,” Swenson said. “There are going to be changes as our community grows and call load increases.”
Swenson hopes to present his findings to Lino Lakes City Council within a couple of months.
