Volunteer Firehouses Face Modern Challenges

During Tom Stewart’s first year as Fire Chief in the town of Ashland, he says the department responded to seventy emergency calls.

That was 1982; last year, they answered almost five hundred calls, a lot for an all-volunteer force.

“You stay up all night long going to a fire, then you still have to do your forty-hour a week job,” Stewart says.

For Stewart and most of Ashland’s two-dozen volunteer firefighters, that day job is out of town.

These days, employers don’t let them leave so easily when there’s an emergency.

As chief, Stewart gets a $7,500 annual stipend to do the department’s budget and payroll.

He’s also responsible for equipment upkeep, making sure the firefighters get enough training, and recruiting new volunteers.

Then there are building inspections and code enforcement with today’s tougher state and federal safety standards.

“There’s a lot do. I’m only one person,” Stewart says.

“I am tired. People don’t understand. They really don’t understand what it’s like.”

Stewart says too much gets left undone, and he loses sleep fearing the consequences.

Facing similar challenges, volunteer fire departments around the state have been starting to hire some full-time staff.

The New Hampshire Fire Academy says out of 244 departments, seventy now have at least one full-timer on their payroll, usually the chief.

Departments in Auburn, Chester, Pittsfield, Epping, Kingston and Henniker made such hires in the last five years.

In Ashland, Chief Stewart and his staff say it’s time their town followed suit, but the taxpayers are not so sure. At town meeting they’ve nixed the idea of hiring a full-time fire chief four years in a row.

“There’s always that struggle between providing services and where you’re getting the tax money to do it,” explains Town Administrator Tim Cullenen.

“It becomes very political, very political. The ability to rationally analyze the costs and benefits kind of gets put on the side.”

Ashland’s firefighters worry it’ll take a tragedy in town to prove that politics can pose risks for public safety. Phil Stittleburg hears that concern a lot as Chairman of the National Volunteer Fire Council.

“Unfortunately sometimes in the fire service we don’t do terribly good job of making the community aware of what they really need,” he says. “If you’re comfortable with the level of service you have now, and it’s not all that great, well then that’s your political decision, but be alert, or at least aware of the level of service you are confining yourself to.”

Stittleburg adds, taxpayers could do more to help, if they insist on sticking with volunteers.

After all, he says, volunteer firefighters save them 40 billion tax dollars a year.

“I think if we can encourage the community more actively to take over non-operational roles. In other words, the accountant who says I don’t really care to be a firefighter, I don’t care for the danger, the timing, whatever it is, but I’d help do budget work for the department, well, that frees up time. When you’ve got the mechanic helps with maintenance, school teachers help with public education, that frees up time.”

There are other options; some towns are combining forces as regional fire departments to share costs and services.

Nine towns are using federal funds to hire paid staff, under a four-year grant program. In the first year, the grants pay the full cost of hiring full-time firefighters. Over the next three years the communities have to match an increasing portion of the salaries.

But Ashland’s Town Administrator Tim Cullenen says the grant won’t work for his town.

“That money’s gotta come from someplace,” he says. “It’s nice. It gets you into it, but at the end of the four years what’re you going to do? If you still don’t have the money, how are you going to pay for it?”

And right now, Ashland has a more pressing concern; they’ve got to find someone to replace Fire Chief Tom Stewart, who turned in his pager in April and retired.

For NHPR News, I’m Shannon Mullen.