Texas volunteer firefighters dwindle in fast-growing cities

Forces shift to full-time, paid workers to handle increase in calls

By Wendy Hundley
The Dallas Morning News

HIGHLAND VILLAGE, Texas — When Lonnie Tatum was hired six years ago as fire chief in Highland Village, he was the only full-time employee in a department staffed entirely by volunteer firefighters.

Today, the stalwart band of volunteers is slowly being replaced by a full-time, paid firefighting force required to keep pace with the growing Denton County city that has doubled in population since 1990.

“Highland Village for years was a quaint and quiet lakeside community,” Chief Tatum said of the city on the shores of Lewisville Lake. “Today, it would be tremendously challenging — if not impossible — to provide the level of service that residents expect with all volunteers.”

Highland Village is not alone. Volunteer fire departments — long a staple of rural areas — are slowly disappearing in many North Texas communities as the surging population is transforming tiny hamlets into fast-growing suburbs.

Nationally, the number of volunteer firefighters has dropped more than 8 percent since 1984, according to the National Volunteer Fire Council.

Increased training requirements, combined with the demands of work and family, account for much of the decline, said Kimberly Ettinger, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based organization.

The volunteer fire service also is aging, she said, as young people move away from small towns for job opportunities in larger cities or have longer workday commutes that cut into their free time.

Despite their falling numbers, volunteers still are the backbone of the fire service, especially in rural areas.

Nationwide, 72 percent of all firefighters are volunteers, council statistics show. In Texas, 1,497 of the state’s 1,852 fire departments are staffed by volunteers, according to a 2001-02 survey conducted by the Texas Forest Service’s Forest Resource Protection division. The survey is believed to be the only one of its kind.

“We’re a long way from those numbers changing,” said Will Collier, deputy executive director of the State Firemen’s & Fire Marshals’ Association of Texas. “We’re a big state, with a lot of rural land.”

Most of the shift away from all-volunteer departments is occurring in fast-growing cities such as Highland Village, where a $3 million fire station is under construction. It’s needed to support the city’s service calls, which have increased from fewer than 700 in 2001 to more than 1,100 this year.

As the population has grown, the city’s volunteer firefighters have declined to about half of the 53 who staffed the department just a couple of years ago.

“We’ve lost so many because they’ve gone to full-time departments in other cities in the metroplex,” Chief Tatum said. “We provide the training and the experience for them, and they’re able to move on. We’ve been able to be the spark plug for the careers of many firefighters.”

In Collin County, the fast-growing town of Fairview still has an all-volunteer department. But officials say it’s just a matter of time before it will slowly convert to paid staff. “It’s inevitable that it will happen at some point,” said Town Manager John Godwin. “We’ll phase it in over time.”

The trigger for the changeover? When the number of calls can’t be handled by the volunteers who now number more than 20, he said.

Funding also plays a major role in determining when departments make the shift to an all-paid staff. In Glenn Heights, south of Dallas, commercial and retail growth is lagging behind the jump in residential growth.

“Our calls have increased, but the revenues aren’t there to hire staffing,” Glenn Heights Fire Chief Chris Shook said. The department has nine full-time, eight part-time and nine volunteer firefighters, but is in the process of transitioning to an all-paid staff — as soon as tax revenues increase enough to put more firefighters on the payroll.

Little Elm recently opened its second fire station and expects to hire as many as nine more firefighters in the next four years.

“I think we’ll move toward all-paid [staff], but we’ll have volunteers for a while,” said Chief Joe Florentino, who also serves as vice president of the Denton County Fire Chiefs Association. “At one time, Denton County had about 10 fire departments that were all volunteers,” he said. “Now there’s only two left: Ponder and Double Oak.”

One city that is bucking the trend is Rockwall, which has just launched an aggressive recruiting campaign for volunteer firefighters.

“We want to stay as much volunteer as we can,” Chief Mark Poindexter said.

Rockwall, which had an all-volunteer fire department before 2000, has nine paid staff, including seven certified firefighters. It also has 37 volunteers, 60 percent of whom are professional firefighters who are employed in other cities and work for free in their hometown

The volunteers save the city $5.7 million and helped Rockwall achieve the same Insurance Services Office rating — the method used to evaluate firefighting effectiveness — as cities with all-paid staffs.

The city is building two more fire stations to handle continued growth. But instead of hiring more firefighters, Chief Poindexter wants to recruit as many as 35 more volunteers.

On Nov. 2, signs calling for volunteers were posted at 25 locations around Rockwall. A week later, the department had 13 responses from interested residents.

While the number of volunteer firefighters may be shrinking in other cities, Chief Poindexter believes they’ll play a prominent role in Rockwall for many years to come.

“Can you ever have too many volunteers?”

Copyright 2007 THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS