No joint fire services necessary for Georgina, East Gwillimbury

East Gwillimbury, Georgina working toward shared fire truck maintenance, repairs

Yorkregion.com
Feb. 21, 2023
Amanda Persico

In East Gwillimbury and Georgina, two fire departments are better than one.

In early 2022, the towns received $356,000 from the province’s municipal modernization program to complete a joint fire services assessment.

The assessment showed no significant benefit of reduced costs or reduced rescue time in merging the two fire services into one unit.

Instead, the report outlined a number of shared services that would benefit both towns.

“This review solidifies that we are making the right investments and helps us to continue to develop critical partnerships, such as these, to ensure we can continue to provide the best value and service to our residents,” said East Gwillimbury Mayor Virginia Hackson.

The first shared service is fire truck maintenance and repairs.

Starting in 2024, pending budget approvals, East Gwillimbury will transfer maintenance of its fire truck fleet to Georgina’s in-house repair.

Currently, East Gwillimbury fire trucks are serviced by a third-party shop in Brampton.

Having repairs done closer to home will result in less milage and off-line time for the heavy rescue machines.

This also would lend itself to future bulk purchasing for truck parts and, ultimately, fire trucks, increasing the towns’ purchasing power.

Along with moving to Georgina’s in-house fire fleet repair shop, future shared services could include enhancing automatic aid, creating special technical rescue teams with firefighters from both towns and sharing future fire stations.

East Gwillimbury and Georgina already have a response agreement for Highway 404, where Georgina fire services responds to incidents on the highway travelling through East Gwillimbury.

Another area for future automatic aid is Ravenshoe Road, where the fire services unit that could get there faster is dispatched first regardless of where the incident is.

When it comes to special rescue teams, especially when it comes to underground or structural collapses, the fire department with the highest level of training is dispatched first. In York Region, that’s Richmond Hill and Vaughan fire departments -- meaning it could take between 45 and 90 minutes for specialized rescue crews to arrive.

Merging neighbouring municipal fire departments isn’t new -- Newmarket and Aurora merged into Centre York in 2001 and Bradford West Gwillimbury and Innisfil are in the initial amalgamation stages.