How do you know when you've added enough of an ingredient to some soup? How much seasoning do you have to add to get just the right taste? What happens if you put in too little? Too much?

In terms of your culinary skills, the answers don't mean much because it's all a matter of taste. But taste is the least of your concerns when talking about how much fire protection your community needs. In fact, a whole bunch of questions will bubble to the surface that are not only significant but are at the center of many of our discussions about public fire protection policy. What's the minimum size of a fire department? Is it possible for an organization to become so large that it no longer effectively delivers services? Can a fire department become so expensive to operate that it can no longer sustain itself without significant cuts?

These aren't idle questions. On the contrary, they're the basis of a discussion that's playing out in city council and fire district board meetings all over this country. The first fact that needs to be established in this discussion is the correlation between two factors in our communities with what type of fire protection we'll be able to provide. Those two variables are people and property.

I know it's an old joke, but how many of you have heard that there are three main causes of fire: men, women and children? Well, the reality is that the demand for fire protection services is almost always a function of population, unless you solely protect a wildland environment. Property, on the other hand, boils down to distance and access.

Let's take these variables and plop them on the old four-quadrant box that we've used for years in risk assessment: low to high population on the vertical axis; small to large area on the horizontal. The lower-left quadrant represents low population in a small area. The upper-left box is high population in a small areas. The lower-right quadrant would be low population over a large area, and the upper-right box would contain high population in a large area. The lines that separate the four quadrants represent thresholds. For example, if you have a fire department that serves a low population in a limited area, there's a possibility of migrating in either direction. You could end up with more people or a larger area.

There has been a lot of discussion about how we can best set some scientific parameters for what these four different scenarios represent. Yet in the development of those scenarios, none of those factors are actually talked about. For example, a house is a house is a house. If you have a single-family house in a remote area of Montana, it still would be a single-family house if it were plopped down in the center of Los Angeles. The real difference is the amount of money available to provide a level of service to that house — an amount that varies drastically depending on the funding mechanisms that are in place.