Fire dispatch in Nelson is now provided by the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George (RDFFG).
The City gave the green light to outsource fire dispatch services through the RDFFG in June of 2025. The agreement came into effect on Tuesday.
A press release from the RDFFG said the agreement means when someone in Nelson calls 911, the call is first answered by E-Comm, which determines the type of emergency and routes the call to police, fire or ambulance dispatch centres as required.
When a call requires fire rescue services, the RDFFG will dispatch firefighters and coordinate response resources.
The service operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is delivered by trained emergency communications professionals at the Fire Operations Communications Centre at Prince George Fire Hall No. 1.
Nelson Fire Rescue Services receives about 1,500 calls per year. The city approved the new dispatch agreement to address staffing pressures and align with other agencies in the Regional District of Central Kootenay, which already use the RDFFG’s fire dispatch services.
The city looked at several providers before entering the agreement with the RDFFG, which was ultimately identified as the most cost-effective choice.
“We reached out to Kelowna, Fraser Fort George, as well as looked at what it would cost for police to operate dispatch for us. And Fraser Fort George was the more cost-effective option by a significant margin,” Nelson Fire Chief Jeff Hebert said at the June 5, 2025 council meeting.
“We had discussions with other municipalities that run both police and fire dispatching, and the challenges that we ran into were that fire and police CAD (computer-aided dispatch) systems don’t talk to each other. We’d need to run independent CAD, which is very cost-prohibitive, and the staffing increases required to meet the fire dispatch requirements made police not a viable option.”
The transition will also save the fire service $61,000 in total operating costs over three years.
The new fire dispatch service will cost up to $211,000 per year from 2026 to 2028, based on 2,000 fire dispatch calls annually. Most of these costs will be covered by savings from reduced overtime for staff.
An additional $100,000 covers items such as radio dispatch equipment and upgrades to fire station alert systems, which aren’t covered by the grant.
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