When someone says, “It isn’t the money, it’s the principle,” you can bet it’s the money. I’ve been in the fire service for almost 35 years and I can’t remember a time when money wasn’t a major issue.

We have been tasked with providing fire protection, EMS, and myriad other special-response and life-safety missions. To provide these services effectively, we also must invest in training for our responders and education of the public. For all this, fire departments need public funds.

The public increasingly wants to know where their money is going. That’s fair. Unfortunately, “knowing” and “understanding” are different things, and some choose to vilify the fire service for the raw numbers they see, rather than trying to understand the investment value the figures represent. That’s unfair.

Citizens on average pay more per month for cable television or at the local barista than they do per month for ALL of the services they get from their fire departments. I think that is a bargain by any measure. I think many others would too — if we told them.
In 2012, we need to dispel many myths that have captured the public’s imagination:

The fire service wastes money on toys and staff that sits around all day. Our expenses are relatable to any other business — personnel, training, equipment, fuel, and the brick-and-mortar housing for the people and equipment. Personnel often represent the largest expense in career departments, but the same can be said for most businesses of comparable size.

All of the equipment and buildings we use cost money, and some are expensive. Heavy and specialized equipment in any industry is expensive; but, unlike private industry, we are subject to strict guidelines concerning how and what we purchase.

The fire chief wants a bigger budget just because. I never have witnessed this; but I also rarely have witnessed a chief explain how he developed his budget. Fire chiefs analyze the potential response needs of their community, compare their capabilities to those needs and prepare a budget based on this analysis. Talk about how these figures were developed, and share data and concrete examples.

Personnel expenses are too high/you have more people than you need. Fire chiefs don’t determine the number of people it takes to provide effective services. We make recommendations based on our knowledge and experience, on standards and regulations, and on the level of acceptable community risk determined by citizens and elected officials. The cost of the firefighters usually is set by a collective-bargaining agreement that is signed not by the fire chief, but rather by the authority having jurisdiction’s representative.

Overtime costs are a sham. Again, we don’t get to determine our overtime costs, which are calculated as the cost of the personnel times 1.5. However, the number of personnel required to meet a specific need is determined by the community and the AHJ, and the level of overtime that a department incurs is dictated by the number of personnel that was available at straight time. That is not to say that overtime issues do not need to be addressed. They do, but not in the way that most people think.

Fire chiefs need to take a leadership role in educating the public that the need for overtime most often is the result of a government choosing one level of coverage but staffing at a lower level. Not only does using overtime cause the public and the AHJ to have a false sense of the amount of people it takes to provide a certain level of protection, it puts the fire department in a bad light and creates an environment of distrust that can be detrimental to the community. Further, it increases the potential for fatigue that can endanger both responders and the public.

We always must search for ways to improve how we provide services through innovation, cost-sharing and consolidation of resources. But in order to be truly effective at this, we also need to improve how we keep the public informed regarding the return we provide on the funding they invest. If we truly open their eyes to how we use public monies, we may be able to get them to see the right principles as well.

Al H. Gillespie is the president and chairman of the board of the International Association of Fire Chiefs. He also is fire chief of the North Las Vegas (Nev.) Fire Department.