The Clearwater City Council continued to discuss a revised fire contract formula during a workshop in mid-October.

Last month the council voted to send Clearwater and Lynden townships a 90-day notice that the current contract would expire at the end of 2019. That action was prompted by repeated debates over the number and location of service calls.

At the workshop this month, Administrator Kevin Kress presented the council with a number of options for a new formula to replace the existing one, which is based solely on the percentage of calls over a five-year period.

Under that contract, which was agreed upon earlier in 2019 after numerous joint discussions, the city paid 53% of the total contract amount, with Clearwater Twp. paying 24% and Lynden Twp. at 23%.

That formula replaced the old one, where one third of the total fire budget was split equally three ways. The remaining two-thirds of the budget was determined by the number of calls averaged over the previous three years.

At the October workshop, members of the council looked at using a combination of population, market value, number of total structures and number of calls to put together a formula.

Kress said market value statistics were readily available from the county, as was the population. The number of calls is available at the end of each year. The difficulty was with the number of structures.

“This is the hardest one to build a formula for because we don’t know how many structures are in each place. We pretty much have to use the number of permits for housing for each district,” he said.  “You can get pretty close (numbers) from Wright County, but you’re never going to get every garage, every structure...”

The proposed fire budget for 2020 is $347,362. Depending on how the three entities decide to build the formula, the percentages for each district would change as each variable was introduced.

Based on county data, Lynden Twp. has the highest market value and population of the three jurisdictions, but the lowest number of calls.

The City of Clearwater has the most service calls, but the lowest market value.

Clearwater Twp. has the lowest population and is second in both market value and calls.

The number of structures is still unknown.

Kress said the best strategy is for representatives to sit down and agree on which components should be part of the formula, regardless of the final numbers.

The city is in contact with both townships, trying to agree on a time and date to meet to have a formula in place by the end of the year.

As of this week, no meeting has yet been set.