When talking about libertarian theories of government, someone always comes forward with the example that fire departments be privatized. When I point out that private fire departments were already tried in this country and didn’t work, someone always points to volunteer fire departments as an example.
And they are wrong. Fire departments are a subject in which I consider myself to be an expert, having functioned and worked in half a dozen of them over a three decade period. I have been a volunteer with at least four different volunteer fire departments. Three of them are no longer staffed by volunteers, and the fourth is in a VERY rural area.
The problems with running a volunteer department are many. Let’s start with the reason why libertarians want to use them- money.
Funding
While cheaper than a full time, paid department, volunteer departments still cost money, and in most cases those departments are nowhere near as effective as a career department. There are only two ways that a fire department can be funded: Through tax dollars, or through voluntary donations called “membership fees.”
The tax dollar funding model is self explanatory, so I will spend some time discussing membership fees. In order to become a member of the fire association, each property owner pays a voluntary membership fee, with these fees ranging from $30 to a couple of hundred, depending on the particulars. If a member’s property is responded to by the fire department, their membership fee is all that they pay. If the fire department responds to a nonmember’s house, there are two possibilities:
- The department refuses to respond to the nonmember’s property. This creates a lot of bad press, as people think that it’s wrong to allow a home to burn down because they haven’t paid. There are those who say “Just let them pay the fee after the house catches fire.”
- So the department has a fee structure where a nonmember is billed after they have a fire. That is not really workable, because the chances of any one person having a fire is exceedingly small, on the order of 1 in 10,000 or so. Many people will roll the dice in such a situation and wait until they have a fire to pay. If everyone refused to pay until they have a fire, the department would either have no funds, or the fee would be so large that people couldn’t pay it. Even volunteer departments charge fees of $5,000 or more to put out your fire.
All fire departments require large amounts of funding. There are fire trucks to be bought, a fire station, firefighting equipment, insurance, utilities, fuel, and a myriad of other expenses like training that all must be paid for. The larger and busier the department is, the more that costs.
Let me explain:
Volunteer department D: This was a very busy volunteer fire and rescue squad in a large city (over 400,000 people) that had been in operation since the 1950s. Over the years, more and more career firefighters were added to staff the station during periods when the volunteers were unavailable. When I was there, one fire engine and one ladder truck in the station were staffed 24/7 by a crew of 8 career firefighters, while several EMS units and a second fire engine were staffed by volunteers. There are no longer any volunteer firefighters there. While I was there, it was volunteer, but it still was funded by tax dollars and had an ISO rating of 4/9.
Volunteer Department H: This is a volunteer department in a very rural area of the Ozark mountains. It’s staffed by untrained volunteers, and while they work hard, they have almost no money for equipment. The fire engine that they had was a 1950’s era fire truck. In the year that I was there, they had exactly 5 fires: 2 brush fires, 2 chimney fires, and one house fire that saw the house burn to the ground. It had an ISO rating of 9. It is funded through mandatory fire fees that are collected through the county tax office, and has an operating budget of about $50,000 a year, even though there are only about 500 residents.
Volunteer Department B: This was a busy volunteer department that responded to approximately 4,000 calls per year out of two stations that contained a total of four engines, two brush trucks, two ambulances, a pair of tankers, and a rescue squad. The ambulance at each station was staffed by two career firefighters, and the fire engines were staffed by volunteers. The requirement was that one fire engine at each station was staffed 24/7 by two volunteers. Each volunteer was required to be in the station for four 12 hour shifts per month. The funding for this department came from tax dollars. Eventually, the department went to a full time career staffing model. When it was volunteer, it had an ISO rating of 5/8.
Volunteer Department M: This was also a busy volunteer department. It responded to about 1,500 calls per year out of one station. It served a small town of about 12,000 people until the late 90s, when the population (and 911 calls) exploded, with the town going from a population of 12,000 to 70,000 within just three years. The volunteer system collapsed under the weight of increased call volume, and it was taken over by a career department. The station had a rescue squad, a tanker, a fire engine, and a brush truck and was supported by tax dollars. Its ISO rating was a 6/9, but the station is gone and there is a gas station where it used to be.
There are some very successful and large volunteer fire departments. The Thibodaux Volunteer Fire Department is one such department. It boasts 500 volunteers responding to calls out of 10 fire stations, with 150 of those volunteers being active in responding to calls, the rest of them doing fundraising and other services. The department has an ISO rating of 3. However, the city of Thibodaux provides nearly half of the department’s $2 million in operating expenses from tax dollars. This is a great example of the best in Volunteer firefighting, but it still needs to be funded through taxes.
Staffing
The additional fact is that volunteerism is declining in this country, and has been for decades. A lot of factors go into the reasons for that. The demands on volunteers’ time is one- training, maintenance, and increasing call volumes are big reasons for this. Not to mention, it’s easy to get people to show up to the “exciting” calls like plane crashes, fires, and auto accidents. It isn’t nearly as easy to get volunteers to show up to EMS calls, because it isn’t “fun” to show up and deal with the demented old lady who is covered in her own shit. Firefighters, especially volunteers, are adrenaline junkies, and EMS runs just aren’t exciting.
Trust me- I was in charge of retention and response at department M during the end of my time there. We tried a mandatory staffing model like Department B, but there weren’t enough volunteers to do it. We tried paying a volunteer $5 an hour to staff it during the day when the other volunteers were at work. Then we tried paying volunteers $4 each for showing up to EMS calls, but that didn’t work either. The demands on people’s time was just too much to bear. The number of calls that went unanswered climbed steadily, until almost 10 percent of non-fire calls went unanswered. People just didn’t want to run the “boring” calls. As one volunteer told me- “I am here because I like putting out fires. I give the time I want to give, that’s what volunteering means. I am not about to come in at 2 am just to wipe grandma’s ass or deal with some homeless junkie.”
Training
Another demand on firefighter time is training. Everyone likes to do live burns. Those are fun. Where people don’t like to train is in the more dry subjects- classroom time in HAZMAT, medical training, and the hundred other topics that are required to run a fire department. It’s getting more and more difficult to get people to come to things like training. Even paid firefighters hate training- and there is a lot of it. To become a state certified firefighter and EMT in Florida takes nearly 2,000 hours of training, and then another 250 or so hours of training per year. It’s a lot, and volunteers just don’t have the time to engage that much.
It’s tough, and it’s getting tougher, to recruit, train, and retain volunteers. It’s tough to fund their operations without using tax dollars- in fact, it’s almost impossible to do so without some form of mandatory, tax funded source of income.
