Owensboro is officially joining a statewide system designed to cut red tape when disasters hit. City Commissioners on Tuesday approved signing onto Kentucky’s Emergency Management Mutual Aid and Assistance Agreement, which standardizes how communities request, deploy, and reimburse emergency resources.
Municipal Order 31-2025 authorizes the City of Owensboro to participate in the agreement with the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management, creating a uniform framework for cities and counties to provide assistance during declared national, state, or local emergencies and clarifying responsibility for eligible costs.
Officials said the statewide agreement is intended to speed up and simplify emergency response when local resources are overwhelmed by large-scale events such as tornadoes, floods, or other disasters. While mutual aid has long existed through regional or informal arrangements, this marks the first time Kentucky has adopted a standardized framework used statewide.
“Basically, it’s just clearing up all the paperwork and that side of it for us to be able to respond at the state level,” said Corey Gant, a battalion chief with the Owensboro Fire Department. “We have mutual aid agreements with several counties around us already, and for that matter, also with Kentucky EMS Region Two. This just makes it a little bit easier, everybody in the state working together, being on the same terms and knowing and understanding exactly how everything’s going to work.”
Gant said Owensboro responders have assisted other Kentucky communities numerous times in recent years, including deployments to Mayfield, Dawson Springs, Bowling Green, London, and eastern Kentucky following tornadoes and flooding.
“We’ve gone to Mayfield after the tornado. We’ve been to Dawson Springs twice after tornadoes. We went to London earlier this year after the tornado. We went to Eastern Kentucky during the flooding last year. We went to Bowling Green after the tornado,” Gant said.
While those responses were coordinated through the state, Gant said they often lacked a single, comprehensive agreement governing reimbursement and deployment expectations.
“There wasn’t this piece of paper in place,” he said. “Basically, the state called and said, ‘We need your help. We’re covering it all.’ This is just clearing up a lot of red tape and having to back up the paperwork behind it all.”
Under the agreement, assistance can only be requested after a local emergency declaration by a city or county executive or an executive order from the governor or president. Each responding agency must first assess its own ability to provide aid without compromising services to its residents. Any city or county receiving assistance is ultimately responsible for reimbursing all eligible, reasonable, and documented expenses incurred by the responding agency.
“It’s all laid out in this as far as how reimbursements work,” Gant said. “There’s personnel reimbursements, equipment, material, supplies, and record keeping.”
Gant said Owensboro has been fortunate not to have faced a disaster that required calling in large numbers of outside responders, though he noted past events such as the 2001 tornado could have triggered a statewide response under the new agreement.
“You’re talking about your larger weather events and so forth, earthquakes, tornadoes, things of that nature,” he said. “That’s where this is really going to come into play.”
The agreement is set to run for one year and will automatically renew annually unless a participating city or county withdraws with 60 days’ notice. Owensboro’s approval authorizes the mayor to sign the agreement on the city’s behalf, formally making it part of the statewide emergency response network.
“This has been a process to get this statewide agreement in place,” Gant said. “It’s been in the works for several years. Now it’s finally been done.”
