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Fire alarm: The cost

LI's volunteer departments provide a small-town service -- at big-city prices

BY ELIZABETH MOORE | STAFF WRITER

November 13, 2005

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Back in the 1930s when Coram was little more than a wide spot in a woodsy country road, its volunteer firefighters held Halloween dances and chicken barbecues to pay off the firehouse mortgage.

Seventy years later, with about $5 million in annual tax revenue, their biggest worry wasn't money but keeping up with all the calls for help. They could muster only half the volunteers needed to fight daytime fires, and on many medical calls, no one showed up at all.

So, like a growing number of Long Island fire agencies, the Coram Fire District took two steps to fix its problems: It hired paramedics to handle the increasing medical calls and, in 2003, built a firehouse designed to entice new volunteers.

It is the biggest firehouse on Long Island, a $7.7-million, 39,000-square-foot headquarters with spacious offices, a gym with a tiki-themed juice bar, party rooms lavished with ornate moldings, tile mosaics and stained glass, and vast truck bays whose teal-and-peach-tinted concrete floors match the building's carpets. It is for members only.

"There's a lot of money that's been spent to, I guess you would say, be the carrot on the end of the stick," said Coram Fire Commissioner Tom Lyon.

Hiring the paramedics worked -- county records show the department's ambulance response times improved by 3 1/2 minutes. But, so far, the new firehouse hasn't -- Coram's membership fell from 155 the year before it opened to 141 now. This year, the average Coram homeowner paid more in taxes for the volunteer fire department, $842, than for the county police who patrol their neighborhood and are some of the nation's highest-paid officers.

It is a story, to greater and lesser degrees, that is being replicated throughout Nassau and Suffolk counties. Long Islanders are paying big-city prices to preserve a small-town volunteer fire service that struggles to keep pace with the growing demands placed upon it.

High cost of fire protection

Long Island is the last densely populated region in America served almost exclusively by volunteers. Their service is cherished by many residents as the ideal of what a community should be, neighbor caring for neighbor. But between 1980 and 2000, the costs to taxpayers of supporting fire districts more than doubled after adjusting for inflation, growing almost three times as fast as spending by other local governments.

With 179 different agencies -- each with its own rules, budgets and closely held membership lists -- fire protection on Long Island is so fragmented that it has long defied analysis. But through hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected by Newsday through the Freedom of Information law, a detailed picture emerges of a system whose growing costs and challenges are beginning to overwhelm the volunteers' good intentions.

Volunteer fire protection here costs more than $319 million a year to run, and fire agencies own more than $1 billion worth of buildings and equipment, but most Long Islanders can't count on their local volunteers to deliver help fast enough to revive someone whose heart has stopped beating or to put out a fire in the room where it started.

Emergency fire switchboards are busier than ever dispatching crews to automatic alarms, but actual fires and deaths are way down, experts say and records indicate. Meanwhile, medical calls have far outstripped fire alarms, making up about two-thirds of the workload for most departments that provide the service.

Tougher technical and safety mandates have driven up the cost of fire protection everywhere, but Long Island's volunteer fire agencies have gained national renown for the ways they spend the public's money.

They spend it on premium fire trucks often too big to fit in firehouses and too numerous to staff. Long Island has more fire apparatus than New York City and the city and county of Los Angeles combined, departments that protect almost three times as much land and six times as many people while answering more than 12 times as many calls for help.

They spend it building and expanding firehouses equipped with bars, party rooms and gyms. Long Island has about twice as many fire stations as called for in national standards based on driving distance.

They spend it on out-of-town conventions, luxury hotel rooms, drag-racing competitions billed as training, and elaborate ceremonies that can top the annual budgets of most of the state's fire districts. North Babylon laid out $100,000 for two banquets in 2003 for 208 volunteers, and Nassau fire officials paid almost six times as much going to conferences as those from Westchester County, the state found.

They spend it with no meaningful oversight. The state comptroller collects annual financial data from the districts but hasn't audited one on Long Island since 2001, and only one in five departments files required federal tax returns on the donations they solicit.

And, increasingly, Long Island's volunteer fire agencies -- two-thirds of which are independent districts run by unpaid, elected commissioners -- spend taxpayer money hiring people to do jobs volunteers used to do themselves. They may be called custodians or cleaners, but more and more often these employees are expected to drive ambulances and fight fires.

"Nobody wants to be honest and face the facts," said Commissioner William Theis, chairman of the Terryville Fire District in Brookhaven Town. "I never want to see a catastrophe, but if one happens, the public's going to be asking us, what did we do?

"Just go to a parade and see all the equipment you've got there. Look at my budget this year. In my heart, I know we could have a paid department, but if I propose this, believe me, every Tom, Dick and Harry will be cutting my head off ... But we don't know who is going to come to the fire when the alarm gets kicked."