Wallowa County needs to be involved in lake firefighting dispute

For quite some time now the Wallowa Lake Fire District Board of Directors and the Joseph Fire Department have been at odds over the lake’s firefighting contract. The city fire department has a contract to provide the district’s fire coverage. But for the past two years at least, when the contract comes up for renewal, the two sides have struggled to settle their differences.

The two sides have been at a stalemate. This year, with no firefighters to take up a fire battle should one occur, the district’s board largely went AWOL. The district, it seems, is down to a taxing district but no one to oversee anything, to fight fire, care for the fire hall, take care of equipment. The contract remains unsettled, but the Joseph Fire Department says it won’t leave the lake area without fire service.

Enter Wallowa County. Commission Chairman Mike Hayward decided the situation was untenable. Something had to be done. He has proposed appointing Paul Karvoski, the county’s emergency services manager and the chief of the Enterprise Fire District, to step in and find a solution to a difficult problem — both for the property owners at Wallowa Lake and for Joseph. The area is too important to Wallowa County to ignore. A fire at the head of Wallowa Lake would not only be devastating to the property owners, but to the county’s economy as well as the forest that encompasses a good part of the lake. The situation must be resolved.

The county’s move was a good one. We have confidence that Karvoski can help bridge the divide that exists and come up with a long-term solution so that the lake folks and the Joseph folks don’t have to keep going through this year in and year out.