Across the state, region and country many small cities and villages have been experiencing firefighter shortages. Due to the system that many small-town fire departments use, many or all of the firefighters are volunteers. Pierce County is no different than the rest of the state in this situation.

Almost all fire departments in Pierce County have been struggling or have struggled in the past to recruit and retain volunteer firefighters and all of them utilize this volunteer model.

There are several reasons for the shortage, the largest of them being that these firefighters are volunteering and many of them have full-time jobs or children they care for. Firefighters cannot respond to calls when at work because many of them work in the Twin Cities and some of them cannot respond to calls when they are with their children.

There is also an issue with funding; the departments receive a set budget that goes toward bills, payroll and damages to equipment and there is little left over to give for retirement pensions and other forms of payment.

Smaller towns usually do not invest much into the emergency services and this has an impact on firefighter retention across the state.

“It is hard to convince someone to go into a burning building for $11 an hour,” said Elmwood Fire Chief Tom Joyce.

Another issue contributing to the shortage is urbanization, Plum City/Union Fire Chief PJ Hines said.

“There are not any big businesses or any industry in small towns so there aren’t as many people,” Hines said. “There are also less farmers in the area, so the population is just smaller in general. We’ve been pretty lucky, but it is really hard to get younger people to join and volunteer.”

The county’s population and its towns has largely remained consistent over the past decade; however, many people work elsewhere or eventually move to bigger cities for various reasons. Students graduating high school usually go to college right away, so it is hard to recruit at that age.

Elmwood Fire Department has used different methods to try to recruit.

“We try recruiting at the high school but there is only so much they can do without the training, but having extra hands helps a lot,” Joyce said.

The students are allowed to leave school during the day if there are any fires that need responders.

Plum City has a similar program called the Junior Program, where high schoolers age 16 and up can volunteer but cannot go into fires because they are under 18 and do not have the appropriate training.

“There is only so much they can do; the program helps with recruiting, but it is still difficult finding young people because they move away once college starts,” Hines said.

In Plum City, the firefighters are all volunteer and do not receive any pay for the calls they respond to.

“We discussed adding pay to our calls but many of the volunteers decided against it, we just do it because we want to help the community.” Hines said.

River Falls Fire Chief Scott Nelson said while his department doesn’t currently have recruiting problems, it has in the past.

“This is really an international issue,” Nelson said. “We don’t have a lot of problems recruiting currently but we have before. We also like to offer our volunteers meals during training sessions, and we do receive pay when responding to calls so there is some incentive for us, but we have definitely struggled with recruiting volunteers in the past.”

Spring Valley Fire Chief Mike Fitzjarrell said, “COVID also really hurt our recruiting process; we usually do career days at the high school, word of mouth advertising and we couldn’t really do that during the pandemic.”

Spring Valley is one of the few departments that does have a retention program that offers retirement funding that can be drawn from once volunteers turn 60. The volunteers also get paid per call like some other departments in the area. However, the village still struggles with recruiting volunteers.

According to Fitzjarrell, he thinks the main issue is urbanization.

“Smaller communities just do not have a lot of jobs or higher paying jobs so many people are leaving this area for those jobs,” he said. “We will have people go through the training process, but they eventually leave to bigger cities, so the retention suffers.”

The departments across the county all cooperate and respond to calls together. Some of the departments have mutual aid agreements and auto aid agreements and respond to all the same calls if they are close enough. Spring Valley, Elmwood, Plum City and Ellsworth consistently respond to fires together.

“We will always help each other out but when we respond to calls outside of Elmwood, we don’t get paid as a department, so it still hurts our funding,” Joyce said. “But we will always help each other out because we all are experiencing the same problems with shortages.”

Funding causes many issues for small town fire departments. Although they may not be responding to as many calls as in more populated areas, there are still many costs. If equipment needs to be repaired or replaced and it is over their annual budgets, that money comes out of the pockets of the department.

Many of the departments rely on yearly fundraising to cover extra costs throughout the year. Firefighter Trevor Halvorson from Elmwood Fire Department said, “We really depend on our fundraiser each year and it is so important to our department.”

On top of paying for equipment, reimbursements and other annual costs, training also costs the departments. When they do recruit volunteers, they go through one to two years of training and these classes come from the department’s budgets or straight from the individuals.

Each fire department in Pierce County is struggling with the same problems: Retention, urbanization, and overall funding. This is true across the country and small towns suffer from the constant population shifts to larger cities. The large commitment with little reward tends to hurt the process of recruiting in these small towns.

Fire chiefs across the county have agreed that there is a real issue here and it can pose a real danger to them and the communities they serve. The departments have come together more and more over the past few years to accommodate for the shortages they all encounter.

To learn more about becoming a volunteer firefighter, contact your area fire department: River Falls: 715-426-3534 or www.rfcity.org/273/Fire-Department Prescott: 715-262-5733 or www.prescottwi.org/190/Fire Plum City/Union: 715308-6242 or visit Plum City/Union Fire on Facebook Spring Valley: 715-7784452 or visit Spring Valley Fire Department on Facebook Elmwood: 715-639-2224 or visit Elmwood Area Fire Department on Facebook Ellsworth: 715-273-4653 or visit Ellsworth Fire on Facebook