I promised a post on fire departments, and here it is. Fire departments are a necessary government service, and no, they aren’t socialism. Some people wrongly believe that anything the government does is socialism, and they are retards for thinking that.
Whether or not it is worth having a fire department, what kind (volunteer or career), and how much service it will offer is something that is largely dependent on the particulars of each community.
It costs a bit over $2 million per year, per fire station to maintain a career fire department. There need to be enough stations so that all houses are within 5 miles or less of a fire station. A small city of 100,000 people that is about 20 square miles in size will cost you about $10 million a year. For that price, you will get a fire department with an ISO rating of 1, and this will save big money on fire insurance for commercial and industrial structures. A town this size will have 100 or so residential and 3 or 4 commercial/industrial fires per year.
A volunteer department covering 100 homes and a population of 500 or so will cost about $50,000 a year. If they have one or two fires a year, it’s worth it.
The average total fire loss in the US for a fire is about $85,000. (Direct losses about $25,000, the rest indirect losses) If your community is small enough that it only has 1 fire a year on average, it doesn’t make sense to have an expensive paid department.
Any department with an ISO rating over a 4 is spending a large amount of money to defend commercial properties. Residential property and their insurance rates don’t really benefit from a department better than a 4.
So my opinion is this:
An area that is mostly rural with low density doesn’t need much in the way of a department, with the largest benefit being a reduction in insurance rates. A volunteer or part-paid system will likely do well. Still, running such a department costs money, and that will likely mean taxes to pay for at least a portion of it.
A smallish city will benefit from a more expensive department, but the largest beneficiaries will be commercial real estate. In those cases, fire fees for commercial property should be what pays for the more expensive ISO 1 through 3 department.
In many cases, it is cheaper to reimburse those who lose a home than it is to pay big money for a fire department. Paying $5 million a year to a department that puts out less than 30 fires a year is a waste of money. It would be more cost effective for that district to be self insured.
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