Local leaders took a step forward to keep Rock County residents safe Wednesday night.
10 municipalities have voted to add five more towns to the Edgerton Fire Protection District. Fire Chief Pickering says after dealing with staffing shortages, this could strengthen the fire district and protect more citizens.
"Every emergency services entity, police, fire, EMS, is really struggling. The labor pool is really shallow right now," Chief Pickering said.
Pickering and local leaders have been collaborating for the past 18 months to tackle the staffing shortages among first responders. "What it's designed to do is make sure there's really two things, response time and depth, that we have the quickest response time we can over the broadest area we can," Pickering said. "When we have two, three, four calls at once [we can] make sure that everybody gets that same level of service."