Tom Nelson was named full-time Chief of the Northfield Area Fire & Rescue Service last week. Nelson has served in a 
part-time interim position since longtime Chief Gerry Franek retired in January.
During his tenure as Interim Chief, Nelson has sought to make organizational changes to the department. He has put renewed emphasis on fire prevention and code inspections and added more options to help the firefighters get caught up on the mandatory training hours that they missed during the pandemic.
The biggest change Nelson has made, however, is in creating a true Command Staff. In the past, the approach has put the Fire Chief at the top as the lone authority and administrative figure. While that was a model that most likely worked well twenty years ago, much has changed in even the seven years since the three entities of Northfield, Dundas and the Rural Fire District came together to form NAFRS, and the new structure reflects that.
In April, Nelson named firefighters Sean Simonson and Jesse Faust as Assistant Fire Fighters with distinct responsibilities. Simonson oversees the Data and Technology responsibilities for the department, which Nelson said is a key focus for the department.
“We have a lot of data, but we haven’t had a lot of good ways to bring it out and learn from it. So reporting, trending all those kinds of things are really key for fire departments now in order to know what you know, and who your customer is, if you want to say it that way. Where you’re going, what you need to work on and making sure that we get as much information to the firefighters going out to a call, so they know what they’re going to be up against.”
Faust meanwhile is Assistant Chief for Operations. Aside from the logistics and the day-to-day responsibilities of the Department, Faust also helps to coordinate training, as well as the fire code enforcement efforts.
Below Simonson and Faust, said nelson, are four Captains. Simonson oversees Fleet Captain Dean Erickson and Training Captain Justin Raabolle, while Faust oversees Rescue Captain Phil Graue and Deputy Fire Marshall Andrew Tuessing.
Nelson said he is looking forward to taking on his new role because he knows there is so much more that needs to be done, but at the moment, there just isn’t enough time in the day to do everything.
“Because, what keeps you awake at night – for me over the past year – has been feeling like I don’t have my homework done or haven’t written that paper because there’s so many things that I wanted to get done during the interim period. And so there have been a lot of times where members of the board would ask ‘Where are you at with this thing?’ and I’d say ‘There’s just… I haven’t had the hours in the day,’ because we all have full time jobs.”
Nelson’s term as Interim Chief will end when his full-time position begins on February 1st.
Better mental health response resources coming to Rice County in 2023
Among the positive developments in Rice County this year, has been the funneling of more resources through the 
Community Services Department and law enforcement toward better respons and help for those suffering from mental illness.
This past spring, the county established the Community Based Coordinator program which embeds a mental health professional with the county law enforcement agencies to assist with mental health cases. And now, according to Northfield Police Chief Mark Elliott, more help is on the way in 2023.
For some time now, Rice County has worked with the South-Central Community Based Initiative, a crisis response center based in Mankato, that can help on a variety of levels, but the partnership has had some shortcomings due to their distance from Rice County. Now, according to Elliott, the organization has received a $1.5 million grant to expand its services in Rice County. Elliott said the grant will help SCCBI establish a crisis response team in Rice County. Until now, the crisis response team had to be dispatched from Mankato, which is more than sixty miles away. Putting people in Rice County will dramatically enhance the services they can offer.
“We like where this is going. We’ve had that option in Mankato for a while, but, a lot of times, it’s difficult to get folks there. And for mobile or immediate response, it can be difficult that you have over an hour response time. So, we’re going to see that program expand and it will be located here in Rice County, which means we’re going to have a much shorter response time to get those services out.”
Elliott said the expansion of the SCCBI service is just one more step to another goal in helping those who deal with mental health problems. In 2021, the Minnesota Legislature passed Travis’ Law, which stipulates that 911 calls for help with a mental health crisis be referred to a mental health crisis team along with law enforcement. The state failed to fund the law, however, leaving many communities, especially those in rural areas, scrambling to find the proper resources.
“Of course, our hope is to move toward what the legislature intended with some of their changes over the last couple of years, and that’s to get to a point where we don’t need to have police respond to a lot of these cases, and we can just get mental health providers to respond out there. We just don’t have those resources available. They’re not in place yet, but this is a good step in moving toward that.”
Elliott has long been an advocate for finding the best solution to offering help in mental health cases, and he said this is indeed going to improve the service that Rice County can provide. He said he hopes to see the new team in place within the next six months.
Jeff Johnson’s full conversation with Northfield Chief of Police Mark Elliott can be heard here
Rich Larson is the KYMN News Director. Contact him at rich@kymnradio.net
[recent_post_carousel slides_to_show=”1″ limit=”5″ slides_to_scroll=”1″ category=”10″ media_size=”medium” dots=”false” show_read_more=”false”]
