The Issaquah City Council is preparing to discuss potential goals to set for its June 6 retreat and Councilmember Eileen Barber wants the city to consider joining discussions with King County Fire Protection Districts 10 and 38 to form a regional fire authority.

The city of Issaquah is currently served by Eastside Fire & Rescue and would continue to be served by that agency under a Regional Fire Protection Service Authority. But Issaquah is one of many local government service customers handled by Eastside Fire & Rescue — including Carnation, May Valley, North Bend, Preston, Tiger Mountain, Sammamish and Wilderness Rim — several of which are dealt with separately in setting up fire service, an arrangement that can result in overall inefficiencies in service.

Regional Fire Service Protection Authorities are special purpose districts, effectively their own mini-government with independent taxing authority and an ability to set best service procedures for the entire area covered by the authority.

Fire authorities were a mechanism authorized by the state legislature in 2004.

King County Fire Districts 10 and 38 are already in the process of forming a planning committee for such an authority. The planning committee will craft the idea of the authority before it’s presented for a public vote.

Barber cited the needed replacement of Station 71, next to Issaquah’s main City Hall building, as a selling point of joining onto the committee.

“If we were members of an RFA the location would be determined by the best benefit to EF&R not by city boundries [sic],” Barber wrote in her goal proposal.

In its response, city staff noted that Districts 10 and 38 are working to put the Authority before voters in November, abbreviating the timeline enough that the city would most likely need to be an observer of the districts’ negotiations rather than a participant. The city would need to explore the tax consequences and governance issues for its own citizens and government before becoming a participant, the response read.

City Manager Bob Harrison noted that he had seen a recent presentation at a recent meeting of King County managers and administrators about cities that had created fire authorities within their own boundaries as a funding mechanism for fire services.

“That’s a little beyond the scope of the goal but if the goal was to consider if an RFA is an effective and appropriate means to provide service … it may be one option to consider,” Harrison said.

Barber’s goal was one of 11 discussed by the city council at their work session Monday night. Others include neighborhood enhancement; better public engagement (citizen participation was found to be low in a recent citizen survey); better coordination with schools for facility siting; investments in emergency management and disaster preparedness; greater funding for the Complete Streets program; setting a city focus on “green” building innovations; administration of a transportation survey; the setting of a regional agenda; and development of a plan to raise funds and pay for the transportation concurrency update passed in January.

Councilmember Joshua Schaer submitted the most goals, with five proposals. Nina Milligan submitted two, Paul Winterstein and Stacy Goodman combined forces for two proposals and Tola Marts and Mary Lou Pauly submitted one.