Answering the Call

Rural departments struggle amid a volunteer firefighter shortage

By Patrick Sullivan | May 13, 2017

If you live out in the sticks and your house catches fire, hope it doesn’t happen during business hours. That’s when, in many townships, few firefighters are available to answer calls.

It used to be that rural departments were staffed with true volunteer firefighters, people who lived and worked in the community and could leave their day jobs to answer calls.

Those days are over. Volunteer firefighters today tend to have jobs located well beyond their individual town’s borders. And they do receive some compensation for their fire-related time. But as demands on firefighters have increased, the volunteer model is straining departments, and fewer young people are willing to answer the call.

VANISHING VOLUNTEERS
The Grand Traverse Rural Fire Department, a once-visionary union of townships that pooled their resources, has been rocked in recent years by local governments — and their citizen volunteers — dropping out.

“I’m a third generation firefighter. My grandfather started the Peninsula Township Fire Department, along with some others,” said Rural Chief Theo Weber. “My father served there, too, as a volunteer. A true volunteer, you know, where you drop everything, you leave work, you go, you help your neighbor. Life has gotten complicated since those times.”

While lack of volunteers isn’t the direct reason townships have withdrawn from Rural in recent years, the problem has lurked in the background as the department has struggled with tight budgets, and townships have sought to have more say over personnel.

Just how bad is the need for volunteers at Rural? Dire.

The department has only 24 volunteers today. Weber said he needs at least 50 more to meet national standards. They need so many because, at any given time, only a quarter of volunteers will respond.

“They’re just not there, and I don’t know if our culture will generate them again,” Weber said. “As a volunteer system, I cannot guarantee a response. I cannot. If people don’t show up, they don’t show up.”

NO FARMERS TO FIGHT FIRES
The generational shift is evident in Antrim County’s Milton Township.

In the past, when fires broke out in the remote rural area around Kewadin, farmers would report to the fire hall and attack the blaze together. Nowadays, the farmers are gone.

“Milton Township used to be pretty much all farmers … those were the volunteers, and those folks are all getting older,” said Matthew Koeplin, a real estate agent who’s been a Milton Township volunteer for nearly four years. “We now have zero farmers, and most of our department is out of the township during the day.”

Koeplin is not your typical recruit. The 47-year-old decided to wait until his children were mostly grown before he signed up. Koeplin said he was among four people who trained at the same time, and every one was over 30 years old.

Milton Township has 17 volunteers, he said, but only nine of those regularly show up, so that number is misleading.

“We’re having a terribly hard time,” he said. 

Koeplin signed up because he wanted to serve his community and because he was attracted to the work.

“I like a little bit of danger — it’s not too much danger, but I enjoy risky situations and doing my best to get people safe again,” Koeplin said. “It seems cliché, but it is a very rewarding thing to do.”

One things for sure: The volunteers don’t do it for the money. Jeremy Ball started when he was a teenager in Elk Rapids, where his dad served as township fire chief for 22 years; today Ball volunteers at Milton Township.

He said he understands that people are too busy to volunteer today, and that nobody’s doing it for the money; volunteers get $30 to respond to a call up to two hours, and $15 per hour after that.

Ball, who works as an Antrim County dispatcher, said he volunteers for the camaraderie and the satisfaction of helping others.

GOING IN ANOTHER DIRECTION
Green Lake Township Fire Department split with Rural in January because the township board wanted its fire department to merge with EMS services — often a first step small departments take toward having a full-time paid staff and relying less on volunteers.

Assistant Chief Mike Stinson said the township got tired of talk in Rural about an EMS merger that never  happened.

“The former [Rural Chief Bill Sedlacek] and I presented the Rural board with a five-year and 10-year plan to start incorporating EMS, and putting on ambulances within the Rural service so that we could generate a cash flow by billing for ambulance calls, and start to pay personnel,” Stinson said “Several years went by — now it’s been six or seven years — and there was no attention paid to that plan.”

Stinson said Green Lake Township officials decided they’d had enough and split.

“[Rural wasn’t] interested in expanding into a different field,” Stinson said. “They just wanted to be firemen. It was within the rank and file,” Stinson said. “It was even within the intermediate command. They just weren’t comfortable with change, I guess.”

The merger with ambulance services has now been fully embraced in Green Lake, enabling the township to move toward having a fire hall that’s manned 24 hours a day. Beginning last month, all new personnel must be certified both as firefighters and EMS responders.

Green Lake Chief David Cutaway said that as more people from downstate move north, they expect better fire and ambulance service.

“That’s what happens. They move up here, they’re getting older. Now those are the same people that start demanding full staff, and they want to get it put on the ballot. They’re willing to pay more on their millages,” Cutaway said. “They want you to make it happen. So eventually that’s how it evolves. It’s community demand. I mean, we’re only providing the service today based upon what the community tells us they want.”

THE DEMANDS OF THE JOB
One factor that’s made becoming a volunteer firefighter unrealistic for so many is the time required to become certified to volunteer.

“The requirements to be a volunteer firefighter are just as stringent as being a career firefighter,” Weber said. “It is required by law. We can’t get away from it.”

A certain minimum amount of training and continuing education is required. Weber estimates that, just to be able to suit up and take a call, a volunteer will have undertaken 427 hours of training: firefighting 1 and 2, hazmat, pump, extraction, and incident management. He or she also would have to earn medical certification, whether at EMT level or as a medical first responder.

“That right there discourages a lot of people. When they want to come and help their community, then we start laying it out to them how much work it is,” Weber said. “It becomes very difficult for people to fit that into their modern schedules. You know, we have both spouses working — multiple jobs in some cases — so there’s very little time to volunteer.”

Shortages of volunteer firefighters are common across the country, but it’s increasingly a rural problem, because cities and densely populated townships can afford to hire full-time professionals.

To attract and retain volunteers, many departments have determined that the volunteers simply need to be paid more.

“Things have advanced because the townships and municipalities have realized that they need to be compensating people to get them to respond a little better, make them feel like they’re wanted,” Stinson said.

Chance Gallagher, who started with the Inland Township Fire Department in Benzie County 18 months ago, has completed intensive firefighter training.

The 32-year-old parts consultant, who is married and has three children, said the demands of training would better suit a younger person, one who didn’t have the family responsibility. Gallagher said he wouldn’t have been able to tackle the job if his wife wasn’t willing to help cover for him at home.

“It’s good for the younger people who don’t have a family and who are living at home and need something to do to keep them out of trouble,” he said. “It is quite a bit of time, which is where we are really running into our problem of finding volunteers.”

Still, Gallagher said, being a volunteer firefighter a satisfying endeavor, and he’s glad he can help people.

“I just kind of had a calling,” Gallagher said. “I felt like there was more that I could do. There’s always been people out there who have helped me.”

NIGHT AND DAY
Another complicating factor for Rural departments: The average volunteer rarely spends his or her days in the immediate area he or she serves. Volunteers typically have full-time jobs located miles away from their home community, removing them from the pool of volunteers available to answer calls.

“Across this country, for volunteer firefighting, the daytime response is the most difficult,” Weber said.

At night, Weber said, there are always enough volunteers to respond when someone’s house is burning down. But those volunteers are usually less enthusiastic about responding to more run-of-the-mill calls like down power lines or a smoke alarm.

“They want to help, but they’ve got a little amount of time to help, and they can’t be up all night doing those things and then still report to work and be valuable employees,” Weber said. “So, yeah, the situation has changed tremendously.”

When Kelly Stiner joined the fire department in 1987, he was a true volunteer firefighter.

“We were 100 percent volunteer — no pay, no compensation whatsoever, and it was basically hands-on training,” Stiner said.

Today, he’s a lieutenant and a safety officer for Rural, working out of the Fife Lake and Kingsley stations.

 Stiner says that around Kingsley, if a call comes in the middle of the day, there might only be a handful of people available to respond. Stiner works at Century Link, a company that lets him leave his job to answer emergencies, a rare allowance from an employer nowadays.

“During the day, there’s only myself and maybe one or two other firefighters that are around that can respond,” he said.

VOLUNTEER PAY
Pay for volunteers varies from department to department.

At Rural, volunteers only get a fixed stipend: $25 per call or training, whether the call or training takes one hour or five.

Other departments pay volunteers by the hours that they work.

Firefighters with Green Lake make $13.15 per hour for calls and training, though recruits are not paid for their initial training.

At Rural, the pay is viewed as an effort to ensure that being a volunteer doesn’t cost too much.

“That’s how we try to compensate them for their out-of-pocket expenses,” Weber said. “We pay for all their schooling, and we pay for all of their equipment. However, it takes money out of their pocket to respond.”

For young men and women who want careers as firefighters, that’s a good deal. Working as a volunteer firefighter is like attending firefighting school free; many become certified and learn the ropes at rural volunteer departments, using the experience to get jobs at professional departments.

Weber did that himself.

“We are the training ground,” he said. “The volunteer service is the training ground for career service, and I will tell you that, that was my pathway, too. I worked for a paid-on-call department for 10 years in Frankfort, and with that training I was able to secure a full-time position with the city of Traverse City, and I retired from there.”

ATTRACTING THE NEXT GENERATION
Weber said Rural has applied for a grant so it can hire a recruiter.

But if the problem is people not having time for the onerous training and commitment volunteer firefighting requires, what’s the recruiter supposed to say to land recruits?

Weber hopes someone can finally get a message to young people who have time that it’s worthwhile to volunteer.

“We have to reach out to the next generation, and the next generation isn’t coming knocking on our door like the previous one,” he said. “So we have established a Facebook account, we have a website — that’s old school now. Now we’re doing Instagram — my administrative assistant handles that account.”

Whatever methods the departments use to attract recruits, the reason people join departments remains the same: They want to be a part of something larger, and they want to help their community.

“They ain’t going to do it for the money because the money is never going to compensate you enough for the time you put in,” Cutway said. “You’re missing dinners. You’re missing birthday parties. You’re giving up free time because of your trainings. It’s a huge sacrifice. The only drive that makes you do it is being community oriented, I mean, there’s no other way around it.”

TIGHT BUDGETS IN THE STICKS
Another part of Rural’s trouble is that it runs on a .72 millage — a tight budget compared to other departments. This year’s budget is a half-million dollars because the department earned some income from vehicle sales, but next year the budget is projected to be $350,000.

Compare that to Grand Traverse Metro, which operates on a 2.3 millage that brings in nearly $4 million per year. Green Lake Township’s annual budget is $533,000.

Rural operates with just three paid employees: Weber, an administrative assistant, and a part-time accountant.

Weber said he agrees that the department should move toward a paid-employee system that combines EMS and fire.

He believes that cross-training firefighters and EMS responders is one way to keep a department like Rural going.

“These EMS people who are not part of my organization are here 24-7, but if we cross-train them and become one organization, it’s the best bang for the buck for the taxpayer,” he said. “Now I have an immediate response out of my station with at least two people to do an assessment of the scene and get things started.”

These cross-trained, paid firefighters would handle the bulk of the business — the everyday calls of trees down and smoke alarms. The volunteers could be called when big emergencies occur. That would mean fewer demands on volunteers and might make taking those positions more attractive.

Weber said he’s tried to push the department in that direction but he’s met resistance.

“It was put before our board, but they are doing exactly the opposite,” he said. “They are fighting amongst themselves. They are splitting.”

Weber said he is frustrated by recent political quarrels among Rural’s townships and he wonders whether the department will even survive.

“I don’t know if it’s sustainable,” Weber said. “I’m just being honest with you here, you know — it’s been a lot of turmoil. A lot of political infighting. Operationally, we’ve been doing great, up until the point where all this politics started. Would you want to join a losing team?”