If adopted, every division then has the responsibility to bring it back and by whatever way that works best locally, to fulfill the requirement or procedure of that policy and comply by local enforcement or whatever creative way they are able to meet the expectation or the spirit of the expectation. That's where the enforcement comes in. I'm not the MABAS police, nor is the executive board [the] police. We're not going to run into town with a hammer or stick to hold over their head. The stick is locally owned, and the carrot is locally owned.

Third, a chief sets up his mutual aid response running cards from the first response to a fifth alarm, and they can go beyond if they want. When a chief drafts those cards and picks fire departments around him or her to be on those cards, it's his decision who he puts on the cards, and it's his decision what strategy he wants to apply and how those cards are set up. It's his call on how he judges the risk when he's putting these different cards together.

Nobody tells a chief how to set up the cards, and it's each chief's responsibility to set up those cards. When you set them up, you send them out to everybody and they have 30 days to review what you are asking for. If they have a problem with what you're asking for or what level of alarm, then they can say, “Chief, I can't meet what you want.” Our whole system is voluntary. If you are unable to respond because you have your own situation, you take a pass and your local dispatch center back-fills that hole automatically.

There's a 30-day comment period on these cards. If you don't send a comment in, then it's assumed it's okay and the chief signs them into effect on a certain day, and that becomes their running cards for extra alarms within the MABAS system. At any time, a chief that's a resource on those cards can send a letter to that chief and say, “I am no longer able to meet your requests. Remove me from the first-level box alarm to the fifth” or “Take me off your card altogether.” It's within the system.

If you have a chief or an agency that refuses to comply with the minimal standards and the expectations of the membership, then any chief or all the chiefs on that card can send a letter and say, “Take me off your cards.” Now if you're the chief who is not complying and people are saying “take me off your cards” because you are not equitably participating, it's an unsafe situation…. If that chief gets those letters, he effectively has no mutual aid because all of the participants are saying, “Count me out.” It's another form of political pressure to get a chief to pay attention.

Have you had to enact any of the mediation efforts?

We've only had one situation a number of years ago that required the mediation to be put in place. It resolved the issue, fixed the problem and cost the fire chief his job. Politically, the local system is what fixed it, and compliance to their own rules was in their best interest. The whole policy board [and] the politicians realized the chief was resisting things like using incident command and firefighter accountability, and it was in their best interests to comply. The chief resisted to the point that they terminated the relationship.

Does [mediation] work? If you look at an organization our size — we're probably around 37,000 firefighters, over 1,000 fire departments — we've only had one mediation. Something's working. That the philosophy is accountable to self first, and then accountable to everyone else is what's making it happen. Centrally coordinated and facilitated, “de-centrally” the enforcement and compliance, and if either side drops the ball, we have mechanisms to fix it.