Orono and Long Lake have reached a tentative deal to form a joint fire department next year, a move that could bring an end to a contentious lawsuit over fire services in the two cities.
“The work isn’t finished. We certainly have more work to do, but this is a pretty major hurdle,” Long Lake City Council Member Jahn Dyvik, who participated in negotiations, said in a meeting Tuesday night.
Councils in both cities agreed this week to negotiate a new agreement that “establishes a new fire department,” with a goal of setting it up by January of 2026. Many details — including its budget and the size of its staff — still need to be determined. In the interim, the two cities will do some training together and offer each city’s firefighters access to the others’ equipment, in some cases.
If additional negotiations go well, the two cities have a “preliminary framework” to settle the lawsuit that exacerbated tensions between local leaders as Long Lake accused Orono of recruiting from its department. Orono was twice held in contempt of court.
The future of fire services — and how Orono should navigate its relationship with Long Lake — proved to be key issues in last fall’s elections, which drew thousands of dollars in campaign spending. Orono voters selected three new leaders who said they wanted to work with Long Lake.
“We wanted to be very thoughtfully considerate about the impacts this would have on the firefighters,” Orono Council Member Steve Persian said in a meeting earlier this week, adding that the agreement was “not perfect to either side” but is meant to be a compromise.
Orono surrounds the smaller city of Long Lake, and the two communities shared fire services for years.
Orono leaders in 2023 decided to form their own department, arguing that they could do a better job overseeing the department and would spend more on staff in hopes of improving response times. Long Lake sued for breach of contract and accused Orono of trying to hobble the department.
