A long time ago, people weren't compensated with dollars and cents. The concept of money was preceded by the idea of value. In early societies, those things that were incredibly rare developed an intrinsic value, and people would barter services in exchange for those precious commodities. Among them was salt.

Salt often was dispensed to pay for services delivered. Salt was valuable because it could be used for a wide variety of domestic purposes, including the preservation of food. It's from this time back in the dim past that some individual was asked if what he provided was worth its share of salt, and a cliché was born.

Today when we wonder if something is worth its salt, we are weighing costs and benefits. Is there value in what you do, and is that value being compensated with something that has intrinsic value? Although our paychecks are in dollars and cents rather than buckets of salt, the acquisition of wealth is still based on the fact that people will pay high prices only for those items that they truly value.

Many fire chiefs have mayors and city council members who want to know the value of a fire department. In spite of our profession being around for a couple hundred years, this question still gets asked for the simplest of reasons: It has yet to be answered in a manner that satisfies everyone.

With the exception of poor, desolate fire departments that have neither funding nor expenses, the majority of fire departments cost money. No matter what type, volunteer, combination and paid fire forces cost money. There's no such thing as free lunch. However, the more expensive a department is, the more people want to know what they're getting for their money.

Let's start with the simple premise that cost must equal benefit. When there's a disparity in the perception of the benefit in relationship to a cost or there's no nexus between the benefit and the cost, the person paying tends to get a little bit cynical. I don't know of any relationship more cynical than that between those who pay taxes and those who benefit from how those revenues are spent. Regarding the fire service, taxpayers are asking themselves just how much they're paying for fire protection and how much fire protection they're receiving.

The corollary to the equation of cost and benefit is that level of effort equals level of service. Every fire department has both of these components in place at all times. The level of effort is defined as the amount of investment that a community has put into its fire department in the form of tax revenues and fees for services. The level of service is what's actually provided on the streets, which has been interpreted most often as fire trucks and firefighters. In reality, all fire departments have a level of effort for every program, ranging from their investment in training and the level of training provided to the investment in fire prevention and the level of general life safety in their communities.

On the level of effort side there's a way to keep score. The total amount of money spent for fire protection is one manifestation of the investment, but a more straightforward representation of what it costs the taxpayer is the per capita contribution. If there are a lot of people in a community and they are willing to pay a lot for fire protection, you should have the resources to provide a fairly high level of service. It also follows that if you don't have very many people and they are unwilling to contribute to the fire department's infrastructure, the level of service is probably going to be lower. When we talk about costs, we have to address the public's perception of what's reasonable.

The test of reasonableness isn't very easy. Many people will disagree entirely over how much money should be spent on any given program. But in this case, reasonableness is a reflection of whether the amount of money that can be raised is sufficient to generate an infrastructure that will meet the needs of those who are paying the tax.

Therefore, when talking about the cost side of a fire department, we shouldn't focus on the total amount of dollars but rather on how those dollars are generated by the people who live in the community. This is absolutely critical because level of service isn't an abstract concept; it's measured by what you actually do for people when they come to you for service.

Now we move to the other side of the ledger, where the level of service equals the amount of benefit. Here is where a lot of fire departments have a difficult time articulating what benefits are derived by specific costs. One of the hot topics that falls into this category is whole idea of performance measurement. How well are you doing? Talk about a complicated question. How you're doing depends on where you are. Let's go back to the other side of the ledger for a minute and talk about the people who are paying the per capita costs. If we base a fire department's entire performance measurement on response time alone, those people who have never placed a demand on the emergency response system don't have any direct benefit. That performance measurement is meaningless to them. Yet we often find that the most common definition of level of service in most communities is the ability to cope with emergency response.

I would replace the word “benefit” with a more streetwise phrase: “What's in it for me?” I'm of course referring to those who pay the per capita costs. What's in it for them? If we move up the budgetary food chain of who controls fire service revenues, we often find that the mayor has that same question: What's in it for me? If we communicate with finance directors, city managers and others, they often phrase a similar question.

We need to do a better job of answering that question. The primary benefit of having a well-equipped, well-trained and properly led fire department is that it provides a community with the highest potential quality of life. Our benefit is our availability and our reliability when called upon.

People often say that the cop shop has done a better job of justifying its existence than the fire service. Whether we agree or not, we have to recognize that there's a perception that law enforcement has done a much better job articulating the outcomes of their performance. As president, Bill Clinton made a promise to put more “cops on the street” that resonated with many politicians. I would argue that if that proposal didn't imply a perceived benefit of reduced crime, the cost of those cops would have been argued.

Will putting more firefighters on a fire truck make fires go down? Most of the justification for the fire service has to do with dealing with the consequence of failure. If we don't have enough firefighters on our truck, buildings are going to burn. Then again, if we do have those firefighters on the truck, are buildings not going to burn?

If we are going to talk to the community about the benefits provided by a fire department, we can't focus entirely on emergency response. We have to focus on the total level of service being provided. Instead of justifying staffing on the basis of bad fires, we need to explain how outcome analysis usually would prove that a sufficient number of firefighters arriving on the scene before a fire goes to flashover will prevent that fire from destroying more property or taking more lives.

How many structure fires did you have last year? How many of them were confined to the room of origin? Moreover, at how many of those structure fires did you arrive on scene and actually lay hoselines that made a remedial difference? In many cases fire departments lack that sort of information; in fact, we don't even like to talk about it. If we don't get to lay a lot of line, there's an implication that we don't need those firefighters.

My answer to that line of thinking is this: Just because you don't crash an airplane every time you land, it doesn't mean you should get rid of the co-pilot. The body of knowledge about fire service performance is growing increasingly sophisticated. Consequently, we have to become much more sophisticated about how we use that performance information. How does a really good fire prevention bureau perform? What are the performance measures of a really good community relations program? What are the performance measures of a really good fire investigation program?

Many would say that the fire service primarily measures input rather than output or outcomes. I think that assertion is at least partially correct. Yet a recent U.S. Fire Administration document illustrates trends and patterns in the national fire data that result from having adequately trained properly equipped fire departments that respond in a timely fashion. Structure Fire Response Times from the USFA/National Fire Data Center Topical Fire Research Series, available at www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/tfrs/v5i7.pdf, should be read by every fire chief in this country. Some of the material may be well-suited for use in benchmarking your particular department's current response-time performance. The report provides several correlations between statistically longer response times and higher flame spread in structure fires. Isn't that one of the benefits we are trying to prove locally?

Obviously, the questions raised by this column don't have simple answers. But it's important to consider them. More and more fire chiefs are being confronted with these kinds of questions when they go into budget discussions. The more we know about the actual benefits of our labor, the better off we are going to be in our attempts to justify the cost side.

Granted, some departments are just plain lucky and receive everything they want from the community. But for the rest of us, as costs for government continue to increase, the question of whether a community is getting its money's worth is never going to go away. All it will do is evolve into other forms of inquiry that we must be prepared to address.

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With more than 40 years in the fire service, Ronny J. Coleman has served as fire chief in Fullerton and San Clemente, Calif., and was the fire marshal of the State of California from 1992 to 1999. He is a certified fire chief and a master instructor in the California Fire Service Training and Education System. A Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers, he has an associate's degree in fire science, a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in vocational education.