San Juan County’s fire authority outlined Nov. 8 a plan to build a deployable wildland firefighting and mitigation module and asked the county for financial assistance for equipment and startup costs.

Fire Authority leadership (represented by Clark Damon in the transcript) said the authority is preliminarily accepted into a Department of Defense equipment program that would reduce apparatus costs. Damon described a potential funding strategy involving a $20,000 El Pomar Foundation award and a county match; during the meeting he discussed a range of apparatus pricing and said the authority would likely request a smaller county appropriation this year (the authority suggested it may seek roughly $30,000 from the county as an interim step while pursuing grants and alternate procurement discounts).

Damon said the authority intends to hire summer staff, put crews to work on local mitigation projects when not on deployment and follow federal deployment protocols if the state or feds call them up. "We're the first volunteer department that's been preliminarily accepted" into the Department of Defense equipment channel, the presenter said, noting potential acquisition cost savings.

Commissioners asked the authority to provide an itemized, line-item budget and a written operating plan that details payroll, benefits, insurance coverage and how any reimbursed deployment revenue would be managed (whether revenues would remain with the authority or be applied to county escrow). They also asked for SOPs and clarified that CTSI-insurance coordination would be necessary for deployment coverage.

Why it matters: a locally based wildland crew could improve mitigation capacity and local firefighting resilience, while the one-time apparatus costs and ongoing payroll have budget implications for the county.

What comes next: the authority will return with an itemized equipment and administration budget, written SOPs and a clarified revenue-flow proposal so the board can consider a funding appropriation during the emergency-services allocation process.

Source: San Juan County Board of Commissioners meeting transcript, Nov. 8, 2025.